I'm going to go ahead and get our recording started here.
And welcome our presenters for today.
We're so excited to have these presenters, welcome to Amanda McLaren, the director at the  Benzonia Public Library.
Welcome Dale Musselman, my colleague at WebJunction.
The Selena Ortega-Chiolero, is the museum specialist at the Chickaloon Village Traditional Council in Alaska.
And my other colleague, Mercy Procaccini is the senior program officer with the Research Library Partnership.
We're thrilled to have you here and very excited about today's learning.
Welcome.
I'm going to go ahead and pass it on over to Mercy, who will get us started.
Welcome.
>> MERCY PROCACCINI: Thank you, Jennifer.
And hello and ask bell come all.
I'm just really grateful to see you all here.
As Jennifer said, my name is pp, and I am program officer with the OCLC Research Library Partnership.
And I'm the project coordinator for the WebJunction Project that we'll be talking about.
I'd like to start with a land acknowledgment.
My WebJunction colleagues and I are all joining you from  Seattle, Washington.
We'd like to invite you to consider and reflect on the place and land where you are living and breathing in this moment.
We would like to acknowledge that we live and work on the traditional land of the First Peoples of Seattle, the  Duwamish.
We honor with gratitude the Duwamish people, past and present, in appreciation of their enduring care of these lands and waterways.
In chat we're sharing a couple links to learn more, including a resource about creating land acknowledgements.
So a brief walk-through for the agenda for today.
So shortly we'll kick things off with a poll to learn a little bit more about what you're doing at your libraries.
And then we'll talk about digital collections and  stewarding them.
I'll also provide some background on the project and then we'll hear from Selena and Amanda, who as practitioners, will share their perspectives on community connections and digital collections work.
And then Dale will wrap us up by talking about a series of  courses that we've developed to support this work.
And we'll have time for some questions at the end.
So this is where we'd like to hear from you.
So please, go to the link in chat.
It's pollev.com/OCLC.
And what we'd love to hear is which of these have you done at your library?
There's a range of different work that we're curious about, and we invite you via the  PollEverywhere to go ahead and share.
I don't know if it's perhaps recording oral histories, digitizing some items that have already digital.
Perhaps it's collecting or archiving web content, and we invite you to indicate all that apply.
And if you haven't started yet, you're in the right place, and we'd love for you to share that as well.
So I think folks are still responding, but this gives us a sense of where you all are.
So we'll just take a few more moments here, just give you all a chance to get past -- you might get that warning message from WebEx.
But you can proceed past that and get to the poll.
Right now it seems like  digitizing newspapers, photos, and documents are clearly what's most popular, but we'll allow a little more time.
 to make sure that folks have time to respond.
And the other thing is, if you're digitizing things that aren't listed here, or maybe doing some other digital collections work, please share that in chat.
We'd love to hear from you.
Put that in chat, and if you have websites that feature your digital collections, I'm sure your colleagues and peers here would love to see that as well.
So go ahead and put that in.
And I'm just waiting to see if it looks like where -- we're pretty much stabilizing.
So seems like so many of you have already started to engage with this work, which is really exciting to see.
And we're really excited to share some resources and  training for those who haven't started yet, or are looking to learn more, and it does seem like digitizing newspapers, photos, and documents are definitely one of the most popular ways to go about this.
And so with that, Dale, I think I'll hand it of to you to chat a little bit more about digital collections and stewardship.
>> DALE MUSSELMAN: Great.
Thanks, Mercy.
That pretty much tracks I think pretty well with what we've  seen, what we've expected, though a lot more of you have done digitization work than I might have guessed.
But hopefully we'll have something of value for everyone here.
So we're going to start just by revel setting just to make sure that we're all on the same page as we start talking about digital collections.
You can tell from the selections from the poll that when we talk about digital collections of this project, in the training that we've created, we're talking about library -- in library terms about special collections in digital form.
We're not talking about electronic resources like  e-books, databases, that sort of thing.
We're talking about unique collections that -- of locally relevant and meaningful items that relate to the history, culture, people, and physical environment of your community.
These are the kinds of materials that in physical form, smaller libraries may collect in a history room, or maybe locally history corner of the room.
Or they may think of them as local archives or special collections.
And of course for local museums and archives, these are also the core -- would be the core collection materials.
As we talk about digital stewardship, and we will talk about digital stewardship, we mean the overall life cycle of activities from this initial planning, creating policies, to creating the collections acquiring collection items, digitizing, managing,  organizing, preserving, and sharing.
And then the ongoing cycle of continuing to do all of those activities over and over again.
Forever.
We're going to talk a little bit about the history much the project, where it came from, we have two groups, the OCLC, WebJunction, as well as Washington State University's  CDSC Center for Digital Scholarship.
And cure A-- curation.
Present our side, I think one of the starting points -- places for us thinking about digitization, digital platforms, digital collections was the 2017 OCLC report, Advancing the National Digital Platform.
The State of Digitization in U.S. and Public State Libraries.
That was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services as was the project we're talking about now.
This report created a snapshot of the activities and attitudes around digitization in public libraries at the time.
.
At WebJunction we were -- where we are particularly interested in smaller libraries, smaller public libraries, and the report identified specific needs and opportunities there.
So we noticed that 91% of -- and this is all small libraries with service populations, these numbers, small libraries with service populations under  25,000.
So 91% of those libraries identified that they had unique locally significant materials in their possession.
So lots of stuff out there.
Only 42% had done any digitization at all.
And of those, 67% of the ones who had done the digitization have no digitization strategy.
And that I think is key for our project and training.
Because we will -- we do focus on planning and strategy and policies in the training.
67% of all of the small libraries identified insufficient staff training expertise.
Staff training and expertise as a major barrier to their digitization work going forward.
This is probably hardly a surprise to anyone.
So this sort of set-up -- set us up with identifying a need, but we didn't start off with a lot of experience on the -- in WebJunction.
With digitization and digital collections.
So we ended up teaming up with someone who did.
And Mercy will talk a little more about them.
>> MERCY PROCACCINI: Thanks, Dale.
Yes.
Switching gears a bit to look at digitization work and tribal archives, libraries, and  museums, or TALMs.
So I'd like to go back a few years and in 2017, Dr. Kimberly Christen, director of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Cure Apples to Apples which we'll be referring to as CDSC, CDSC at Washington State University gave a talk at OCLC that introduced many of us to what respectful, community-centered approaches to information work flows and access should look like.
And we continue to learn more about her work with TALMs, which identified their unique needs and responded to them by offering through the sustainable heritage network, workshops and trainings customized for them.
Dr. Christian and her colleagues needed more tools and training and topics like digitization work flows, archives management, cataloging, and preservation to be able to get to the point of online access.
So with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the CDSC developed the Tribal Digital Stewardship Cohort Program which we'll be calling TDSCP.
Over the course of four cycles of the program, which ran from 2015 through 2020, 46 individuals from 25 tribal nations, Alaskan Native nations, and native Hawaiian  organizations participated.
The TDSCP was designed specifically to meet the unique needs of staff at TALM.
There are a number of needs they worked on addressing, but because we're -- only have time to talk about a few I'll highlight these.
First is the importance of respecting unique contexts.
Each Indigenous nation has a distinct historical, political, and cultural context that  informs how they work and how they collaborate.
And the training honored that.
Recognizing that what works for some types of organizations may not translate well in others, and what works in some communities may not be appropriate in others.
And unlike many trainings available at the time, TDSCP's approach to access and use centered community values and Indigenous ways of knowing.
This reflected the understanding that the default approaches to work flows and access, they often repeat colonial legacies of dispossession and erasure.
So TALM staff needed training and systems to support the sharing of their collections on their terms.
And -- aneth -- in ethical and appropriate ways.
And the training was able to address that.
In terms of there being a high level the need for training in TALMs, the organizations are typically smaller, they can be underresourced, often without professionally trained librarians, archivists or curators on staff.
And the training also needed to include flexible distance learning options to minimize staff time away from the office.
And needed to provide approaches and methods that honestly would be achievable for smaller organizations to take on.
So Dale alluded to this and these will come as no surprise that these last few needs overlap with those of small public libraries.
So this plus the interest in making the digital stewardship training more accessible to a broader audience as online courses led to our joint project between CDSC and OCLC.
So Dale will talk more about the project and the courses later  on, but first I'd like to turn things over to Selena, who was a TDSCP participant and we'll hear about her community and about her digital collections work.
Selena, on to you.
>> SELENA ORTEGA-CHIOLERO:Thank s, Mercy.
[not speaking English]
Greetings, my name is Selena Ortega-Chiolero, I am -- my traditional homes are in the Copper Canyon region of Mexico.
Museum specialist -- I live and work on the traditional  homelands where I am currently the museum specialist for Chickaloon Village Traditional Council which is the governing body of Chickaloon Native Village.
I want to share this specific image and let you know why I chose this image.
Sometimes I find it challenging in these types of presentations to convey just how remote and untouched our ancestral lands are.
Land and land stewardship continue to play a key role in our tribe's culture and way of being as our community lies in what we call the bread basket of Alaska.
Which is surrounded by three mountain ranges, two glaciers, and the convergence of two rivers, and in this image you'll see the river.
The village is a federally recognized tribal government low cased in south central Alaska.
Dating back to the earliest 20th Century, the village's territories were tunnelinged to large-scale resource extraction of coal and gold and related developments of the Alaska railroad and the Glen highway.
And this brought new settlers, diseases, boarding schools, and alcoholism, devastating the tribe.
For many years these factors along with the inability to share their stories created a generation of tribal citizens who are now elders, disconnected from their cultural traditions.
As a result, the tribal no longer has a central village, but is dispersed throughout the region, covering several communities, through the city of Anchorage, to the Kenai Pennsylvania communities.
We even have tribal citizens relieding in the lower 48 and abroad.
For the past six years, CVCT has dedicated staff, time, and resources towards developing and growing our cultural resources to support healing and cultural perpetuation as a means of restoring the community's health and vitality.
The mission of CVTC is to perpetuate our ancestors' beliefs, traditions, and values and steward our environment to help citizens thrive.
We focus on gathering and caring for materials that further support the tribe's mission, will also strive to bring home cultural expressions that were taken or removed that are currently being housed outside of our region.
Like many tribal cultural resources, departments, we tend to operate kind of in this  really interesting blend of a museum, a library, and an archive.
For Chickaloon, our permanent collections, we have a subset, which is our archives, and those are the ones that we tend to focus more on our digitization efforts.
So our digital collections include photographs, documents, maps, periodicals, language recordings, oral history interviews, and video  recordings.
And the image you see on the screen are some samples of some of those materials.
Due to our geographical dispersion and the current goals for our collections, we've placed a heavy emphasis on digital collections.
As a result of this, we've spent the past several years attending webinars, conferences, and other professional development  training opportunities that would help our staff to meet these needs.
As previously mentioned by  Mercy, C -- the stewardship cohort which we participated in for the, we were in the final group of a cohort, we created a lot of foundational documents that are now kind of the lead in helping guiding us through our work, and amongst some of the more prevalent ones we created was a collaborative cure Apples to Apples model, a digital stewardship life sigh did and a digitization and access policy.
We're guided in this work through our digitization purpose statement, which is on the screen.
Which is to inform through curated digitization by  unearthing our past and illuminating our present so we may protect, preserve and strengthen future generations.
We're not only focused on digitizing materials from our own collections, but in digital and repatriation projects.
Be museums and archival repositories can be painful sites for native people's, as they're tied to the colonization process.
Indigenous repositories directly reflect the tribe's  self-determination and cultural sovereignty, and because of this, a new framework of collections management must  be -- must consider Indigenous ways of knowing.
For CVTC this includes digital repatriation.
We seek proactive partnerships with repositories who not only acknowledge our connection with materials within their holdings that may not fall under -- but understanding by returning the materials to the tribe, they can restore and rejuvenate  traditional knowledge and  values.
It's in this area where we put our collaborative cure ration model to work.
The model provides focused steps on how to collaborate with outside repositories in a strategic manner so we're helping to build strong relationships with other cultural heritage organizations and institutions.
Currently we're in year one of a three-year digital repatriation project with Anchorage Museum that includes on-site visits with the research team,  comprised of staff, culture bearers and elders with the purpose of identifying images that the museum will create digital surrogates of for the purpose of returning that knowledge to the tribe, and also for our research team to provide cultural knowledge and accurate identification of images, and their collections that will help to improve not only their collection's records, but as well as provide the museum with guidance and how to be more culturally sensitive and responsible when it comes to how they provide public access to those materials.
And on the screen I put this great quote by Jennifer O'Neil, really about how digital repatriation helps restore traditional cultural knowledge.
All our permanent collections, both physical and digital,  places heavy emif sis on meeting our community needs.
Right now that need primarily resolves around language and cultural perpetuation and family unification.
All our policies and procedures include a tribal centric focus, with ongoing consultation with our cultural committee, which is comprised of CVFC staff, tribal citizens, and tribal council members.
Our primary outlet for digital collections is the chinook loon information we share online digital database, which is supported through the  collections management software.
It's a means of connecting our tribal citizens with their culture, history and one  another, while illustrating the interconnectedness.
MukurtuCMS is a digital  platform, be be it is allows communities to dictate various levels of access through the use of cultural protocols, define how materials are organized through the use of communities, and identify how they want users to use their digital assets through the use of traditional knowledge labels.
For CVTC, we use our site as a way for our tribal citizens to connect with their family, supporting our ongoing digital repatriation projects, and to further contextualize our permanent collections so they are more meaningful for our users.
On the screen you'll see the home page.
What we hope through our digital projects is to not only further help support the mission of  CVTC, but also to expand and broaden our relationships.
And we hope that by  participating in educational opportunities like the one you're currently attending, that will help to help broaden that as well as not only lead all -- some of the other tribes that are within our state, but also assist those that maybe don't reside in our state.
And we're hoping this will build a bigger and stronger family for all of us within the Indigenous community.
Thank you.
>> DALE MUSSELMAN: Thank you, Selena.
That was -- I think -- now I have control.
So there's just a lot there.
So what Dr. Krisen shared, the story of the TDSP, of the program itself, the goals of the program, and describe the situation of the TALMs, institutions that they were  working with, there was an interesting combination of -- for us of clear and important differences, clearly, between the TLAMs and U.S. small public libraries.
But also clearly shared interests, values, and certain other situations that they shared in common and the prospect of helping both create and steward ongoing digital collections really seemed compelling for us.
So again, there are of course shared needs, the limited financial resources I noticed people early in the chat noting some of the resources -- resource limitations they experienced.
Financial, staff, technical skills, support, all of these things often exacerbated by geographic isolation.
We have long known at WebJunction working with small public library staff that low confidence is a real -- is really a Camano issue that there is a lot more capacity, a lot more skill, a lot more talent in small public lie brings than small public libraries often give themselves credit for, and the same is true with the TALM community.
All of these organizations, all of these institutions have access to unique local history and stories.
The stories are different, the histories are different, but they're there.
They all have access or should have access in some cases not as much access as they should have, to materials and stories that the communities -- and the communities are often share that concern that they're at risk of losing the history, the stories, not necessarily the distant past history.
I think there's a common feeling of losing -- the risk of losing the stories that are still here that are still present in their communities, and they don't want to see disappear.
So digital collections can  really help represent the histories, perspectives, and stories, voices of the  community.
Voices I think comes up again and again.
But in creating this training, to address both TALMs and public libraries, we needed to come to a clear understanding of the important differences.
And this has been really a  really fascinating part of  taking part of this project for my 7, and I think others on especially the WebJunction team.
All that we've learned over the last 18 months has been really amazing.
These include the reality that a separate sovereign nations and much of the -- of what Selena has touched on is separate sovereign nations, Indigenous tribes have their own culture and experience, and we often have tended in the past to lump them all together and think of them as very similar, when that is not true.
Plus the differences in -- you heard Selena describe her institution that's sort of a combination of library, archive, and museums.
And how different each of those institutions were across the different tribes that the TSCP program worked with.
So not only have they their own cultural differences, but even the institutional infrastructure is different.
How they think of themselves, how they fit into the governance of the tribes are different.
And then the concerns that aren't even on the radar of certainly small public  libraries, like cultural, digital repatriation, and the importance much documenting the languages and recording oral histories so those languages and histories continue to live and maintain that rich cultural link to their history.
All of those are really important, differences that we have driven -- tried to incorporate and make sure that we are respecting and addressing in this training.
But an interesting one of the interesting links that we've seen as we've gone through and talked to public libraries and tribal institutions is, from all across the spectrum, there's a powerful interest in oral histories that I think I didn't quite appreciate coming into this project.
And small town communities and public libraries are very interested in preserving oral histories as well, so next up Amanda McLaren is going to share about the community memory project that Benzie Public Library created.
>> AMANDA McLAREN: Thank you, Dale.
I appreciate that.
Hello all, my name is Amanda McLaren.
And I'm the director of the been Sonia Public Library in beautiful Benzie County, Michigan, where it is currently snowing.
In fact, the most commonly heard phrase in our town right now is "i'm over it."
That's just a fun fact.
I would like to take a moment to acknowledge that Benzie County occupies the ancestral  traditional and contemporary lands of the native people.
The library recognizes the three fires confederacy, the Ottawa, Chippewa, and pot would the me.
We give thanks to the -- as the caretakers of mother earth and for their relationship to the land.
We further recognize the ongoing relationships of dependents upon and respect for all living beings of earth, sky, and water.
I'm grateful to be here today to share a snapshot of our wonderful oral history project remembering Benzie.
Remembering Benzie was made possible by the Institute of Museum and Library Services Accelerating Promising Practices for Small Libraries Grant.
The Remember Benzie Oral History Project is a multilayered project.
Our goal has been to celebrate the unique memories of our community.
Throughout the course of the grant we worked with many local partners.
This was key to everything, to our success.
We collaborated with Benzie central schools to hire a student intern coordinator as well as two student intern cohorts over the course of the project.
We worked with the Benzie areaer historical society and museum to create lasting exhibits and volunteers at the Historical Society worked with students to develop their archival research skills and connect with their community.
The Benzie County Veterans Affairs Office helped us connect with veterans, our local newspaper ran consistent stories throughout the course of the project leading to a broader interest, connection, and investment for members throughout the community.
And I just think that helped tremendously to have that community buy-in.
These pictures here make me very happy.
These are two student intern cohorts for the project.
On the left we have cohort one from the 2019-2020 school year.
And on our right, we have cohort two from the 2020-2021 school year.
Having student interns involved in this project was such a tremendous gift.
Not only did this strengthen intergenerational bonds and connect the youth to the past, but it also provided an opportunity for our students to develop skills and be exposed to training and equipment that they otherwise would not have had access to while doing creative intellectual work.
To build our local technological and interviewing capacity, the students and project personnel received in-depth training from a remarkable team from the University of Michigan School of Information.
It was important to include adult project personnel in the training sessions, which included volunteers and staff members from the library, so that becould gain the knowledge to have the capacity to carry on the work independently  post-project.
Trainings included proper interview protocol, research and communication skills, equipment usage, editing, and production.
Throughout the project, interns were assigned interviewees and collected their own choice community members to interview.
Each intern was fully responsible for initial contact, scheduling communication, and all of their interview  questions, and equipment set-up as well as video production, editing, and final projects.
Throughout the project, the students conducted interviews using several existing models.
Existing oral history models.
The Veterans History Project through the Library of Congress, which I'll speak more about  later, story corps interviews, which were recorded informal conversations between family members about their favorite Christmas memories, and legacy project interviews, which were in-depth interviews focused on community members' lives and experiences in Benzie County and the legacies that they would like to leave.
The legacy assist project model preserves unedited footage as well as highly produced short videos.
Students were also responsible for producing a final project video in which they reflected on the project as a whole and what they wished to carry with them.
So why oral histories?
As you know, oral histories stem from the tradition of passing information of importance to the tribe or family from one generation to the next.
Oral histories are one of our oldest and more deeply rooted means of presurfing history.
Sharing stories is important.
It stroantsdzens communities and families.
Whether it is a loved one or a complete stranger, there is so much we can learn from each other.
Stories bring us together, and help us understand each other.
Benzie County, which is the smallest county in Michigan, is full of amazing stories.
Interesting people, and a strong history.
It is important to capture and preserve these voices and stories so that they may be shared.
Throughout the two-year project, students interviewed veterans, farmers, artisans, teachers, entrepreneurs, small business owners, healthcare workers, Peace Corps members, social workers, leaders of the community, coaches, and peers.
Each interview led to meaningful connections, greater understanding, and stronger ties to the community.
And just a side note, the foe to us that you see here are just a few of the community members interviewed.
Students took a portrait of each interviewee, and at the end of the project everyone received a copy of their portrait, a thumb Drive containing their interview, and a thank you card from the student that interviewed them.
Among the most powerful stories were those shared by our veterans as part of the Veterans History Project.
We knew when planning  remembering Benzie that we very much wanted to include veterans in the Veterans History Project was chosen because it  contributes our community's stories to a national  collection, takes on preservation responsibility, and provides an incredible outline and structure.
For anyone that might be considering a place to start with oral histories, I would strongly suggest the Veterans History Project, because it not only lays out very clear expectation, but it also  provides suggested questions and they accept various forms of interview, including video or voice recording.
Our veterans were grateful for an opportunity to share their stories, memories, experiences, and lessons.
While most were very nervous, they were all particularly grateful to be sharing with the younger generation.
There was a very strong inclination to connect, and I heard more than one veteran express the desire for future Joan rations to learn from their experiences.
Their stories were reflective, humbling, heartbreaking, brave, expb wistful.
They were meaningful and they deserved to be shared and remembered.
I would like to share a story from one of the student's interviews, one that impacted me greatly.
While preparing for a first interview, one of our students shared that she was a little nervous.
The man she was set to interview was pretty gruff and rough around the edges, and she was worried she would have trouble connecting with him.
As she began, he was very tense but he gradually relaxed and really opened up.
At the end of his interview, he became a bit choked up as he talked about his son, and how they had grown distant, and how they didn't have much of a relationship at all anymore.
He expressed his hope that his son would one day see his interview and perhaps understand him a little better.
When I watched the interview, I was humbled and overwhelmed with gratitude to be part of a project that would offer him the opportunity and the hope for that connection understanding, and resolution.
Each veteran was given a copy of their interview on a thumb drive, and it is my sincere hope his son will one day find that interview.
This interview also greatly affected the student that he shared with, and the following year on Veterans Day, long after her part on the project was  done, that same student  contacted me for his phone number so she could call him and thank him on Veterans Day.
And these are the moments and the connections and this is really whatis all about.
I want to thank you for your time today and for your interest in connecting others and sharing stories.
It was important for me to be accurate and precise with the information I've provided so  far.
So I will tell you I did read it all, but for right now I would like to take a moment to speak from the heart.
I have been in the library service for 20 years, I've  worked in small community libraries, and I have given a lot of opportunity to work with the community.
And it is one of the things I'm most grateful for.
However, I will say being part of this project is something that I will carry with me forever.
To be in a room with people when they are at their most vulnerable and honest when they were sharing cherished memories and difficult moments is -- it is at the risk of sounding repetitive, it is so humbling and it is such a gift.
I am just so thankful for the time that I had, not only with the community, but with the students.
They signed up for whatever reason, whether it was just to have something that looked good on a college application, or perhaps because they did want that connection.
But watching their growth over the course of the project was just tremendous.
And they all walked away feeling that they understood their community and others much better than they had when they first began.
I would also like to point out the links here.
We used YouTube, which is not only free and easy to manage, but it also opens thing up to a wider audience.
A couple of our veterans history project interviews have even been viewed more than 3,000 times, which is more than our population here in Benzie.
So that's pretty impressive, and really opened up that audience.
So I would like to say again, thank you, please feel free to reach out to me and contact me for anything.
I would be happy to help.
And I'm there if you need me.
Thank you.
>> DALE MUSSELMAN: Thank you so much, Amanda.
For sharing the story of your project.
And I think for both, one of the important things for us of having Selena and Amanda speak in this webinar is really to center how much -- how important values, community, culture, and meaning are to digitization projects, digital collection projects, that small  institutions create.
That's -- I think that's really what is the core, it's not  really the -- the tools, the technologies are the tools.
But it's not why you're doing  it.
I just want to share, we, in this project, in these courses, Amanda and Selena are part of a group of nine practitioners who we interviewed, and whose experiences and voices are throughout this course series.
So I want to share a few others, a few of the other small public libraries and their collections and give a sense if you aren't familiar with the kinds of digital collections small public libraries have been creating.
This is Jaquith Public Library, they also did an oral history project with their own spin on it.
They combined it with a more traditional collection of historic photographs, the  Marshfield Story Project is the name of their project, it includes community-sourced oral history recordings, I love this photo from their website of the home interview kit that you can check out if you live in town.
And record your own oral  histories, and those will get -- those get saved to the collection.
And then also combining that with staff historical images that have been uploaded to the digital Vermont collaborative archive.
And I wanted to, this came up in the comments, I wanted to point out for anyone who doesn't -- isn't aware of all of the  statewide digital memory projects out there, there is a list that we've created that is in the -- in one of the courses.
Probably should be in all the courses.
But there are about, I think between 30-35 states that have digital memory projects that include access for any public library, so on public libraries in the state can add their collections to that platform, which is a great opportunity to get collections out there and solve one of the technical and financial issues that small institutions have with doing digital collections.
Pella Public Library, they have created -- they've collaborated, and partnerships collaboration partnerships that was the other thing I wanted to mention about Amanda's, I loved about Amanda's project, is the collaboration with the high school, Pella Public Library collaborated with the Pella Historical Society and Museum to create a series of collections of photographs, historical documents and family trees that document the history of Pella, Iowa.
And you can see for them they chose to use -- a more  traditional collection system.
I never know what to call the systems, they all call themselves something different.
Door County is a public library that had the most extensive experience of all of the public libraries we worked with.
Nearly 15 years of creating unique collections, including an extensive newspaper archive of a dozen different local newspapers dating all the way wack to 1862.
Also the Door County Memory Project created in partnership with Recollection Wisconsin, another one of the statewide candlelight vigil tall memory projects.
The digitized collection of local publications, including student publications from the early 20th Century, and 1950 travel guide to the county.
And they're sharing historical photographs through gaol photos.
So there's a lot of opportunity, a lot of different ways that you canshire collections, it doesn't always have to be high cost, there are ways around most much the cost issues and equipment and systems do not always need to be super expense.
And there will be more of that, more information about that come -- in the digital collection stewardship courses.
So wrapping up, there are -- we have created a series of seven free, on-demand candlelight vigil tall collection  stewardship courses that are defined for staff at public and travel library archives and museums who are interested in implementing digital collections at their institutions.
So they'll be made available in both WebJunction's course catalog and then also the CDSC's sustainable heritage network.
They cover a lot, you can see them now, there's a link in the chat right now where you can see the page that shows the listing of all seven courses.
And the descriptions of what you could learn from them.
They are adapted from the original -- that original cohort based on training, into online, on-demand courses so they can reach the widest possible audience.
These -- they very much  benefited from the neptsd interviews conducted with our participants from -- publicly brings, and one of the things we will be doing and it's not quite there as much -- as strongly as it will be is supporting  learning groups.
It's something we very much believe in at WebJunction, we will be offering a facilitator's guide specific to the set of courses.
So if someone who wants to organize a group of learners, doesn't need to be a trainer.
It's just like a book club kind of a model.
With discussion guides and questions, and activities and things to do.
And then also we'll offer some training support for doing that sort of activity, for guiding learning groups.
This course series features an updated digital stewardship life cycle model.
You can see on the screen prepare, gather, enhanced.
Save, and share.
It's very much supporting  planning and decision making, those -- those initial documentation policies is a real strong focus of this.
In is not a technical how-to digitize sort of courses.
This is about creating  meaningful programs, planning for them, planning for their sustainability, planning for the ongoing stewardship.
And the first two are actually available for enrollment right now.
So the introduction course, which introduces you to the whole digital stewardship life cycle that we've -- that we're using.
And a lot of the topics we'll be covering throughout the courses, and then preparing, which  focuses on that initial preparation, thinking about documentation, thinking about policies, all of that very important things that often we all want to jump right in and start working, but we are really trying to encourage everyone to focus on having some strategy, having some policies, where appropriate.
And doing that work as well.
So coming soon in May, five more courses, Gathering, Digitizing, Enhancing, Sharing, and Saving.
Those will be published on WebJunction in the WebJunction catalog in May.
And I'll love these questions, we'll also be, as I said, coming to the Sustainable Heritage Network as well.
And we just really want to thank all of you who have come toll this webinar and all of those who supported this work, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, for not just this project, but all these projects that led up to this project.
Participants in the original  TDSCP program from 2015-2020, the TDSCP advisory board, CTSC leadership and staff, WSU Native American programs, our public loi bring interviewees, the project team, especially when Becca Mack Guyer who was our instructional designer who created the courses you'll see, and OCLC as always.
And now we still have time at the end for questions.
We never quite know if we'll manage to save the time.
I of course was not following chat.
>> JENNIFER PETERSON: I know folks have been really good about getting some responses into chat.
I just want to point out that Selena had mentioned the foundational documents and Selena, do you want to talk a little bit about that?
I know you mentioned it and somebody picked up on that.
And has also shared a list in chat of their -- the  foundational documents.
So do you want to talk more about that, Selena?
>> SELENA ORTEGA-CHIOLERO: Sure.
So when -- a also fact.
When I started working for CVCT going on five years now, five years ago, I was originally hired, my background first of all is in museums, and collections management.
But I was originally hired by the tribe to formalize their permanent collections.
And the tribe had been  collecting for many, many years before me.
So when I was first originally hired, the one thing I did create was a collections management plan, which dictates what we collect, how we collect it, but then when we are -- our tribe got excited into the TDSCP program, they help you develop your own plan, but since we had one we were able to change ours a little bit based on more definitive and clear direction that the cohort was guiding us towards.
So that was where we started pa.
But from there we expanded into since we were doing candlelight vigil tall projects, developing a stewardship lie cycle, which is really about how you're gathering information, and how you're digitizing it and managing it through that  process.
And then from there, we developed our collaborative cure Apples to Apples model, which is real -- curation model, which is developing steps for your organization on how you want to collaborate rate with other groups in your information gathering and sharing.
For us, we focused mostly on repositories, since we're really focused on repatriation.
As well as how we want to partner with institutions in sharing our stories.
And then from there, we created our digitization and access  plan, because we were developing our site, and part of that process was really about not just how we were going to digitize, what formats, what information, but also how we were going to provide access.
And for us, we also included a section on social media since that's a huge information  gathering source that we have for our tribe specifically.
A lot of family members are on there.
So we include that as well.
And then when we had all of these things in place, we realized we wanted to revisit our deed of gifts, we had one originally but it wasn't  really -- didn't take into account to our new collections management plan or our digital excellence, and thankfully some of the previous cohort members actually had an ethical research agreement so we used some of those templates to draft our  own.
Because we do have resources that want to use some of our materials, because not everything is digitized, and available through our site right now.
We're slowly getting there.
But we recognize that there  needed to be some control on our end on how people use the information that we have.
How they use our aim dges, our stories.
We have a very, very large oral history collection, on various types of media that we're in the process of digitizing.
So also wanted to make sure that those being are being respected and the cultural knowledge we have is being respected and shared accordingly.
That's how I process went.
I know some of my other cohort members had different focuses, and not all of them were  providing public access.
A lot of their stuff was meant to be stayed within their communities, so as Dale had mentioned, and Mercy, had ever when it comes to tribal communities across the country, everyone is different.
So they're all at a different place, and their foundational documents are going to be different because of that.
>> DALE MUSSELMAN: Thank you, Selena.
And, yes, I think this was -- this whole topic is really the core of the preparing course.
Which is one of the two courses that is available right now, and is definitely a Chelan evening to try to -- it gave us all the position existing and needed documentation and poi assist and foundational documents.
I hope we've done a good job of that.
And it really -- we really tried to focus on reading the learn learner through discovering what they have and what they need and filling in those holes and giving some guidance to have it do that.
But everyone's process is going to be their frent front the -- there was a question earlier about -- from Joshua about the Mississippi digital library.
And many I'll look for met  dataing writing, related to their specs.
Many this is something that we will cover the enhancing course, enhance is the stage in on I lie Katie Lianez cycle that too -- metadata, description, we'll talk about some of that state is labor intensive, and it is  really important.
Clear appropriate culturally sensitive metadata, we know everyone, the library world is dealing with that.
The issues -- of what happens when that doesn't always happen the way it should.
So it is work.
And we are out of time, aren't we?
>> JENNIFER PETERSON: Fantastic.
That's really helpful, Dale, and thank you so much of all of you.
This is so exciting to be at the point where we're able to see all this great work put to  learning for the -- for all of us.
So thank you so much, and reminder that I will send you an email today, once the recording is posted and we'll also be letting you know through  "Crossroads" as the rest of the courses are rolled out this month, we'd love to see you learning within the course series as well.
I'll also send you all to a short survey as you leave.
We really welcome your feedback.
We share that with the  presenters, and it helps us guide our ongoing programming.
So thank you all again, and everyone have a fantastic rest of your week.
And we look forward to  continuing to learn with you  all.
Thank you.