“Street Art Graphics” Digital Archive and “People’s History Archive”
This illustrated slide presentation provides an overview of two digital projects related to street-based stickers, posters, and ephemera from around the world. In 2015, as part of a four-year funded initiative, the Council of Independent Colleges selected St. Lawrence University’s “Street Art Graphics” digital archive (http://www.stlawu.edu/gallery/digitalcollections/streetartgraphics.php) as one of 47 projects across the country to be included in Artstor’s Shared Shelf Commons, a free, open access library of digital images and a Web-based service for cataloging and managing digital collections (http://www.sscommons.org/openlibrary/welcome.html). Items in the archive offer social and political commentary and critique on issues ranging from national/global economic crises, environmental degradation, racism, and sexism to surveillance and police brutality. The more recent Drupal-based “People’s History Archive” (http://peopleshistoryarchive.org/), currently under construction, grew out of a five-year Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities grant to St. Lawrence University entitled “Crossing Boundaries: Re-envisioning the Humanities in the 21st Century.” The goal of the project is to document the creative and complex ways people make use of public space. Contributors include undergraduate students, young alumni, and faculty who create mini-online interpretive exhibits using items from the “Street Art Graphics” digital archive and/or items contributors have selected themselves from off-campus research projects.
Working Together to Promote Digitization, Access, and Education
Over the last 10 years, The Constitutional Sources Project (www.ConSource.org) has connected thousands of American citizens of all ages to our nation’s constitutional history by creating a comprehensive, easily searchable, and freely accessible digital library of historical sources related to the creation, ratification, and amendment of the United States Constitution. Our team not only curates important digital collections of historical materials, but also travels the country, working with judges, lawyers, law students, educators and the general public to ensure that the full story of our constitutional form of government is told. ConSource has worked with brick-and-mortar archives, libraries, digital projects and many others to digitize and curate content related to the creation, ratification, and amendment of the United States Constitution. Several of our current working projects, including digital collections on colonial charters and early state constitutions, and women and the constitution, will digitize and make freely available in digital form materials that have never before been digitized or curated into one comprehensive collection. ConSource has developed a successful digital partnership model that has been refined over time.
Providing Access to Audiovisual Cultural Heritage through the American Archive of Public Broadcasting
The American Archive of Public Broadcasting is an unprecedented initiative to preserve and make accessible significant historical content created by public media. Led by WGBH and The Library of Congress, the AAPB currently preserves 40,000 hours of digital content from nearly 100 stations across the U.S. Nearly 10,000 of these digitized programs have been made available in the AAPB Online Reading Room. The collection contains thousands of high quality regional and local programs documenting American communities during the last half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. This extraordinary collection includes local news and public affairs programs, local history productions that document the heritage of local communities, and programs dealing with education, environmental issues, music, art, literature, dance, poetry, religion, and even filmmaking on a local level.
