Sponsored by Society Circle
Speakers:Digital Activism: Manifestos and Protest Ephemera in the Library- Hannah Bennett, Librarian, Princeton University School of Architecture
Telling the Story of the Lions: A Collaborative, Community-Based Approach to Documenting and Preserving Political Graphics Collections- Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez, Project Archivist, Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) and Bolton Doub, Project Archivist, Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG)
Moderator:Greta Suiter, Processing Specialist, George Mason University Libraries
Preserving and collection social movements presents myriad challenges for archivists and information professionals. This session pairs a fervent call to action with an exemplary case study.
Hannah Bennett of Princeton University will challenge art and architecture libraries to identify, collect, catalog and preserve the manifestos and ephemeral productions created by today's Design Activists. Tracking and preserving such material is especially difficult since it appears in the fugitive forms of email, microblogs, Wikileaks, social media sites, and so on. Simply recognizing activist productions can be problematic in the digital age, let alone collecting, cataloging and preserving them. They can appear--and disappear--instantaneously; they emerge at points along a network rather than on discrete sheets of paper. This paper will address the vital struggle to curate creative audacity in all its forms for the use of generations to come.
A second paper by Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez and Bolton Doub from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) will show how a grassroots archive independent of a parent institution, was able to successfully establish long-term relationships with the communities it documents, while providing access to archival collections through grants, public programming, and collaborative projects. The paper will detail examples of CSPG’s community-based and inter-institutional collaborative projects, with a particular focus on a current two-year National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) grant-funded project to arrange, describe, process, catalog, and partially digitize its entire holdings.
