Tag Archives: digitization

Addressing Underrepresentation in Rural New England Community Archives: Documenting the History of Black Lives in Rural New England

A family in Hatfield, ca. 1889.
A family in Hatfield, ca. 1889. L.H. Kingsley, photographer.

Guest post by Dylan Gaffney, Information Services Associate for Local History & Special Collections, Forbes Library.

This post is part of a series written by members of the Community Webs program. Community Webs advances the capacity for community-focused memory organizations to build web and digital archives documenting local histories and underrepresented voices. For more information, visit communitywebs.archive-it.org.

Forbes Library has been a member of Community Webs since its inception in 2017. At that time, we were hopeful that the program would allow us to create an archive which more fully represented the community in which we live, and provide a more diverse history/record of our region and the people we serve. This project inspired archives staff to examine the many silences in our archives, and make plans for the ethical collection and preservation of materials that would help fill in these gaps in our historical record. At the same time, the library had begun to shift its focus toward collaboration with other local historical and community organizations. 

In the years following the kickoff of the Community Webs Project, Forbes library co-hosted multiple series of exhibits, films, workshops, walking tours, and community reads on themes of mass incarceration, the Underground Railroad, and the history of slavery in our region. These events, and the passionate response of the community to them, inspired us to continue seeking out collaborations, large and small, and solidified our view that surfacing stories of people who had been underrepresented in the archives should be a core value in our work as an institution.

This work inspired Forbes Library, Historic Northampton, UMass Amherst, and the Pioneer Valley History Network to take lead roles in the 2021 Documenting Early Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley project, which seeks to gather the fragmentary information about Black lives from the wide range of sources and archives in Western Massachusetts so that a whole might be perceived that is larger than the sum of those parts. The project, to date, has surfaced over 3500 records or references to people of color, enslaved and free, in Western Massachusetts from the 17th through 19th centuries. These histories are being made available through the project’s database and on the project website. We contributed an essay titled Searching for Black History in a Public Library Archive to the Project Handbook on the experiences and takeaways of doing this work from a public librarian’s perspective.

We know too little about Black lives in rural and small-town New England, and the places Black residents were able to carve out for themselves in these communities. With this project, we hoped to uncover names, details of their lives, and some small sense of how people of color survived in the Connecticut River Valley before and after the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts in 1783. At the kickoff event for the project, UMass Amherst professor Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina mentioned challenging the assumptions of others (sometimes called Gatekeepers) who “might be quick to discourage a researcher interested in Black History, reporting that they don’t have much…or not thinking about ways that records of white families might be useful to this research” Gerzina remarked that researchers, curators, and librarians should ”start from the perspective of presence.” 

As the Documenting Black Lives project was undertaken with grant funding, and the time thus limited, we needed to develop an approach that would be productive right away. We identified several collections in the library’s Hampshire Room for Local History that we expected could be productive resources for identifying enslaved people in the area. The most promising of these was the Judd Manuscript Collection, a collection of 60+ volumes created by local newspaper editor and historian Sylvester Judd in the 1840s. The manuscript was originally purchased from the Judd estate by local historian James Trumbull and subsequently sold to the trustees of the library. It has been the property of the library since 1904, but use has been limited to a small group of academics and local historians who were aware of the contents and could physically visit during our few open archives hours. Those who knew of its tremendous historical value had discovered that it features content documenting Indigenous lives, enslaved people, and free Black people in New England and had used it to research Indigenous culture, the history of colonial settlement, enslavement, and the early abolitionist movement in the area. 

Sylvester Judd’s Account of Sojourner Truth speaking and singing at his grandson Hall’s funeral. Sylvester Judd Notebook Vol. 3.

Sylvester Judd’s Account of Sojourner Truth speaking and singing at his grandson Hall’s funeral. Sylvester Judd Notebook Vol. 3.

Public Historian and Author Marla Miller on the value of Judd:

“Sylvester Judd, in his transcriptions of historic documents as well as the conversations he described with local residents, preserves extraordinary details that survive nowhere else. Because of Judd’s meticulous, wide-ranging work, I was able to gain insight into the lives of laboring people that would never otherwise have been possible…Judd’s notes preserve genealogical information about enslaved people that is found nowhere else. The Judd manuscript is almost archaeological in nature, with shards of evidence that can be unearthed via careful scrutiny. As he records, for instance, who had the first piano in town, who laid the first carpet, the sound of the geese squawking through Sunday sermons, and a hundred other small details of daily life, a picture emerges that simply cannot be found in any other kind of more formal or systematic archival material. These pages, filled from edge to edge with his notes, cross references, sketches, and other materials, simply teem with the kinds of details that historians crave, but cannot hope to find—except in Northampton.”

If we start from an assumption of presence (of underrepresented people both in the community and in the archives), the primary obstacles to discovering and surfacing information in collections like ours, often revolve around issues of access, and methodologies for search and discovery. We had long dreamed of digitizing all 60+ bound volumes of the collection to make them available to a wider group of researchers and the public at large. When the Community Webs program began to explore funding for a digitization program dedicated to expanding the amount and diversity of locally-focused community archives available online to users, the Judd Manuscript Collection seemed a good fit.

Now that the volumes have been digitized, our mission is to spread the word about their value and availability, so that the materials within can inform and inspire new research and discovery. As an illustration of the value of the collection and its contents, it is useful to look at how the increased availability of this resource could lead to new discoveries in long hidden collections. As an example, I will examine how Judd enriched our understanding of one local Black family.

Judd entry for the Hull Family. Northampton Genealogies Volume 4, p. 380.

Judd entry for the Hull Family. Northampton Genealogies Volume 4, p. 380.

Judd devoted entire volumes to genealogies of local families, but the 600+ page volume on Northampton Genealogies contains, to our knowledge, only two Black families, both listed without last names. The work we had done in the Documenting Black Lives project enabled us to compile a list of 3500+ entries for Black residents of the region in the period between the 1650-1900. We recognized these names as those of Amos and Bathsheba Hull and their children. Bathsheba can be found elsewhere in our own archives as a member of the Church of Christ during Jonathan Edwards ministry between 1729-1750, in records recorded by Jonathan Edwards own hand.

Goods purchased by Amos Hull between 1754-1759, as listed in Judd’s transcription of Ebenezer hunt’s Account Book. Northampton Account Books, p. 68.

Goods purchased by Amos Hull between 1754-1759, as listed in Judd’s transcription of Ebenezer hunt’s Account Book. Northampton Account Books, p. 68.

This entry transcribed from a local merchant’s account book shows items purchased by Amos Hull, the services he would perform in exchange for goods received, and the rate at which he was paid. It notes that in 1761, the same year their daughter Margaret was born, Amos Hull died. Afterward, his widow Bathsheba paid for his and her accounts by washing. Bathsheba surely would have a difficult time supporting multiple children without her husband, and documents subsequently found elsewhere in our archives and in other institutions prove this to be the case.

Asaph Hull’s 1762 Indenture Record. Northampton Manuscript Collection.

Asaph Hull’s 1762 Indenture Record. Northampton Manuscript Collection.

By 1762, a document found elsewhere in our archives records their son Asaph indentured to Seth Pomeroy, who is well known for his service in the French and Indian War and would go onto fight at the Battle of Bunker Hill and achieve the rank of Major General.

Judd entry describing the town seizing Bathsheba Hull’s land. Northampton Vol. 2, p. 300.

Judd entry describing the town seizing Bathsheba Hull’s land. Northampton Vol. 2, p. 300.

Bathsheba and her family come up again in several entries in Judd, including multiple mentions of the town seizing her land and displacing her from it in 1765. This cruel act forces Bathsheba and her young children from the town. Bathsheba and her son Agrippa would relocate to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It is in Stockbridge where Agrippa Hull would enlist in May of 1777, and served for the remainder of the Revolutionary War in the Continental Army, including witnessing the surrender of British General John Burgoyne at Saratoga, New York, enduring the winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge and was part of the battle at Monmouth Courthouse, New Jersey in June 1778.  He then served as a personal assistant for the famed Polish general, revolutionary and engineer Taddeusz Kosciuszko and became a close friend of the General, during their years of War Service together. Agrippa’s story and friendship with Kosciuszko, along with Kosciuszko’s friendship with Thomas Jefferson is examined in Gary Nash and Graham Hodge’s 2012 book “Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull”.

Portrait of Agrippa Hull, Courtesy of the Stockbridge Library, Museum & Archives.

Portrait of Agrippa Hull, Courtesy of the Stockbridge Library, Museum & Archives.

Agrippa Hull went on to become the most prominent black landowner in Stockbridge MA and is buried along with his wife and children in Stockbridge Cemetery. His brother Amos Hull, Jr. also fought in the Continental Army, and surfaces in Belchertown MA records recorded as part of the Documenting Black Lives project. 

This is just one brief example of the elaborate web of information that can be revealed when we prioritize the surfacing of stories that had previously been hidden in our collections, increase access through digitization, and collaborate to research and promote the information within. 

As Marla Miller wrote in her letter of support for the NHPRC Archives Collaboratives grant:

“ We can hardly wait to learn— alongside the many other academic and avocational historians whose work will be enriched and transformed by these records—what else remains to be discovered. Once available in digital form, available for scouring by researchers with their own wide range of questions, these materials will certainly spark, inform, and enrich generations of new research, from student papers to dissertations to academic monographs. It is almost impossible to predict all the ways the volumes might reshape historiography, as well as conventional historical wisdom, because the contents at present are comparatively difficult to ferret out. But to be sure, these volumes have the potential to transform local and regional historical understanding, and once digitized, will certainly come to the attention of researchers nationwide.”

Click here to browse the Sylvester Judd Manuscript Collection on archive.org.

The Internet Archive and Community Webs are thankful for the support from the National Historical Publications & Records Commission for Collaborative Access to Diverse Public Library Local History Collections, which will digitize and provide access to a diverse range of local history archives that represent the experiences of immigrant, indigenous, and African American communities throughout the United States.

DLARC Preserves “Ham Radio & More” Radio Show

Ham Radio & More was a radio show about amateur radio that was broadcast from 1991 through 1997. More than 300 episodes of the program are now available online as part of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications (DLARC).

Ham Radio & More was the first radio show devoted to ham radio on the commercial radio band. It began as a one-hour show on KFNN 1510 AM in Phoenix, Arizona, then expanded to a two-hour format and national syndication. The program’s host, Len Winkler, invited guests to discuss the issues of the day and educate listeners about various aspects of the radio hobby. Today the episodes, some more than 30 years old, provide an invaluable time capsule of the ham radio hobby.

Photograph of dozens of cassette tape cases, each with hand-written labels indicating air date and topic of that episode.
just some of the HR&M cassette tapes

Len Winkler said, “I’m so happy that the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications took all my old shows and made them eternally available for everyone to hear and enjoy. I had the absolute pleasure, along with a few super knowledgeable co-hosts, to interview many of the people that made ham radio great in the past and now everyone can go back and listen to what they had to say. From the early beginnings of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) to Senator Barry Goldwater to the daughter of Marconi. So much thanks to the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications for doing this amazing service.”

Other interviewees included magazine publisher Wayne Green, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Bob Heil, Bill Pasternak, Fred Maia, and other names well known to the amateur radio community. Discussion topics spanned the technical, such as signal propagation, to community issues, including the debate over the Morse code knowledge requirement for ham radio operators—a requirement eventually dropped, to the benefit of the community.

The radio programs were recorded on cassette tapes when they originally aired. Winkler digitized 149 episodes of the show himself in 2015 and 2016. The digitizing project paused for years. In January 2024 he sent the remaining cassettes to DLARC. Using two audio digitizing workstations, we digitized another 165 episodes in about three weeks. The combined collection is now available online: a total of 464 hours of programming, most of which have not been heard since their original air date. The collection represents nearly every episode of the show: only a few tapes went missing over the years or were unrepairable. 

The Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is funded by a grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. DLARC invites radio clubs and individuals to submit material in any format. To contribute or ask questions about the project, contact: Kay Savetz at kay@archive.org or on Mastodon at dlarc@mastodon.radio.

Book Talk: Moving Theory Into Practice

Join Internet Archive’s Chris Freeland for a discussion with Oya Y. Rieger about ‘Moving Theory Into Practice,’ the landmark digitization guide & workshop that sparked a revolution in digital libraries.
Thursday, August 24 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET

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As the digital library field emerged in the mid- to late-1990s, librarians faced numerous challenges in building the skills necessary to provide digital access to their collections. That changed in the summer of 2000, when Anne R. Kenney and Oya Y. Rieger (Cornell University Library) produced “Moving Theory Into Practice,” a groundbreaking week-long workshop & digitization guide that offered hands-on, immersive training in digitization and preservation.

The purpose of “Moving Theory Into Practice” was to skill-build librarians, archivists, curators, administrators, technologists, and other professionals who were either contemplating or already implementing digital imaging programs. Its objective was to equip participants with practical strategies that surpassed theoretical concepts, grounded in the latest standards, best practices and informed decision-making.

In our upcoming webinar, we are delighted to talk with Oya Y. Rieger, co-author of “Moving Theory Into Practice.” During the discussion, we will delve into the impacts of hosting these training sessions, shedding light on their significance within the digital library community and the broader library community at the time. We will also explore related training such as Rare Book School, and reflect on large-scale digitization projects like Making of America and state-based efforts to understand the context in which this workshop occurred. Additionally, we will touch upon the evolution of digitization training since the original workshop, providing insights into how the field has matured.

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About our speakers

Oya Y. Rieger is a senior strategist on Ithaka S+R’s Libraries, Scholarly Communication, and Museums team. She spearheads projects that reexamine the nature of collections within the research library, help secure access to and preservation of the scholarly record, and explore the possibilities of open source software and open science.

Prior to joining Ithaka S+R, Oya worked at Cornell University for 25 years. For the past ten years she served as Associate University Librarian, leading strategic initiatives, building partnerships, and facilitating sustainable and user-centered projects. During her tenure at Cornell, her program areas included digital scholarship, collection development, digitization, preservation, user experience, scholarly publishing, learning technologies, research data management, digital humanities, and special collections. She spearheaded projects funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Studies (IMLS), the Henry Luce Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Simons Foundation, and Sloan Foundation to develop ejournal preservation strategies, conduct research on new media archiving, implement preservation programs in Asia, design digital curation curriculums, and create sustainability models for alternative publishing models to advance science communication.

Chris Freeland is the Director of Library Services at the Internet Archive, working in support of our mission to provide “Universal access to all knowledge.” Before joining the Internet Archive, Chris was an Associate University Librarian at Washington University in St. Louis, managing Washington University Libraries’ digital initiatives and related services. He holds an M.S. in Biological Sciences from Eastern Illinois University and an M.S. in Library and Information Science from University of Missouri-Columbia. His research explores the intersections of science and technology in a cultural heritage context, having published and presented on a variety of topics relating to the use of new media and emerging technologies in libraries and museums.

Book Talk: Moving Theory Into Practice
Thursday, August 24 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
Register now for the virtual discussion!

Looking Back at the Million Book Project

Years ago, many people rejected the idea of reading a book on a screen. Fortunately, others had a vision for the potential of digitizing the world’s knowledge.

One of those pioneers was Carnegie Mellon Professor Raj Reddy. The Internet Archive recently hosted a virtual event to honor him and celebrate the 20th anniversary of his Million Book Project that included Reddy, Vint Cerf of Google, Moriel Schottlender of the Wikimedia Foundation, Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, Mike Furlough of HaithiTrust, and Liz Ridolfo of the University of Toronto.

Since Reddy’s dream of providing universal access to all human knowledge—instantly to anyone, anywhere in the world—others have embraced the mission.  Advocates of mass digitization discussed the tremendous impact that open access to creative works online has had on society, the challenges ahead, and potential, if more books are unleashed.

“There are tens of millions of digitized books available on the internet now. Many of these are born digital. Many more are being converted from print copies,” said Mike Furlough, executive director at HathiTrust, which has a collection of 17.5 million digital books. “This is really a human accomplishment that represents decades, if not centuries, of intellectual labor, physical labor to steward and preserve these items.”

Reddy said he knew his vision two decades ago was just the beginning and there is a huge amount of room to improve the utility of digital works. “It’s time for us to put our heads together to find a way to create digital libraries and archives that are far more useful than what we have today,” he said.

Many agreed more must be done to expand efforts, build a sustainable infrastructure and raise awareness of the shifting role of libraries to provide digital materials.

“I think we should ask more questions: What aren’t we digitizing? What are the economic or political forces that are constraining our choices and what corrective measures can we take?”

Mike Furlough, executive director, HathiTrust

Internet Archive Founder Brewster Kahle said Reddy was right that bringing our full history online for the next generation is important, but it’s not been easy technically or institutionally.

“If we’ve ever wondered why you’d want digital books, the year 2020 told us why. The global pandemic hit and shut down school libraries, public libraries, and college libraries,” Kahle said. “We got calls from professors, teachers and homeschoolers, desperate to find some way in their Zoom classrooms to bring books to kids.”

The Internet Archive responded, explaining how libraries could extend access digitally to books that were in their physical collections. This helped make a big difference on the ground, and Kahle says policies are changing so libraries are confident in serving their digital learners. For instance, as libraries spend $12 billion a year on materials, Kahle said they should be able to purchase (not lease) e-books to fulfill their mission of service to users.

There was also a push among panelists for digitization to be more inclusive of works from all kinds of authors, recognizing what is being scanned is what’s already been obtained by libraries. “I think we should ask more questions: What aren’t we digitizing? What are the economic or political forces that are constraining our choices and what corrective measures can we take?” Furlough said.

The future interaction with knowledge involves the digitization of books and expanding the diversity of voices is critical, said Moriel Schottlender, principal system architect with the Wikimedia Foundation.

“Making resources available to anyone online is key and this is really what we’re striving for,” said Schottlender, noting Wikipedia’s mission is to be a beacon of factual information that is verifiable, neutral and transparent. “Our goal is that everyone in the world should be able to contribute to the sum of all knowledge. But not everyone has equal access to knowledge, to books, to journals, to libraries, to educational materials…We use digitization to increase equity.”

“Our goal is that everyone in the world should be able to contribute to the sum of all knowledge. But not everyone has equal access to knowledge…We use digitization to increase equity.”

Moriel Schottlender, principal system architect, Wikimedia Foundation

There is growing demand for all kinds of digital information, said Liz Ridolfo, special collections projects librarian at University of Toronto Libraries.. Donors want items digitized for a variety of reasons including to protect rare items, to reach a broader audience, and to free up physical space for other materials. Especially during the pandemic, Ridolfo said, it has been useful to have a curated collection of online teaching and reference materials.

Vint Cerf, vice president and internet evangelist at Google, said people are increasingly going online to get answers to questions—often turning to YouTube to view how-to videos. That demand for “just-in-time learning” is not a substitute for long-form content, he said, but it’s an interesting phenomenon that may draw people to the internet to learn more.

Looking ahead, Reddy said there is a need for big change to address the broken copyright law. His aspiration is that by 2031, there will be a frictionless, streamlined copyright regime, in which authors register for no fee, but can extend the copyright of a work indefinitely if they want by paying a prescribed fee. For users, he proposes access to copyright material for fair use in less than five minutes. They could pay a required fee, as prescribed by the data for a single copy use. If the copyright is not registered with the national digital library, then fines for copyright violations of unregistered copyright material should be nominal.

“Let’s take Raj’s vision here and make it come true,” Kahle said. “Who should argue against the streamline system where fair uses are easy. Where compensation is understood, where there’s registration and the actual copyrighted materials are in repositories that are long-term protected. Let’s just do this.”