Five Choice Interviews with Digital Archivists and Curators 

Highlights from Choice’s Ask an Archivist

Posted on August 28, 2024 in Blog Posts

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LibTech Insights editor
A librarian posing against her digital collections

One of our favorite features at Choice is our Ask an Archivist column. Every month, a member of the Choice digital media team interviews a curator, archivist, or director about the research and production behind a special collection. While many of these collections are physical, we wanted to take a moment to highlight interviews with archivists who work with exciting digital collections. These collections require specific skills and maintenance, as LTI’s job profile with digital curation librarian Matt Sherman made clear. These interviews with other archivists draw attention to their rich bodies of work and the importance of their undertakings. 

View all installments of Ask an Archivist. 

🏳️‍🌈 The Queer Digital History Project 

When people think of queer spaces on the internet, they might immediately think of big social media platforms like Tumblr. Creator and curator Avery Dame-Griff at Gonzaga University has preserved the expansive terrain of pre-2010 online queer communities, particularly as they manifested on message boards and BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems). As Dame-Griff describes in his interview, these forums had to navigate the difficult waters of being a public platform for issues that were risky to be public about. These materials ultimately informed Dame-Griff’s recent book on the early transgender internet, and this interview highlights the challenges of archiving digital materials and working with an evolving set of communal terminology. 

✊🏾 The Colored Conventions Project 

The Colored Conventions were a series of meetings among Black people, both free and formerly enslaved, before and after the Civil War that sought to create an organizational structure to achieve abolition and racial justice. With grants from the NEH, Mellon, and the Council on Library and Information Sciences, the Colored Conventions Project boasts several digital exhibits based on archival materials from these conventions. Some of these exhibits look at the impact of the conventions on different regions, the emergence of the Black press, and the construction of free schools. The Colored Conventions Project provides troves of material for classroom use, and this interview discusses the animating principles behind this project. 

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🇰🇷 The Korean American Digital Archive 🇺🇸 

The materials gathered in the Korean American Digital Archive focus on the first generations of Korean immigrants, from 1903 to 1965, who moved to the United States as Korea was falling into Japanese colonial rule. Kenneth Klein, a librarian emeritus out of the University of Southern California, has gathered more than 13,000 documents and 1,900 photos—many of them hidden away in attics and closets—from this community, and digitized this collection, in part, as a way of mollifying individuals who were reluctant to part with these long-held objects and mementos. In his interview, Klein discusses how he produced this collection and its legacy and historical revelations. 

⬅️ The American Left Ephemera Collection 

If you’ve ever been to a protest or a rally, chances are that a handbill, pamphlet, or sign has passed through your hands. Often, this ephemera winds up in trash bins, but Edward Galloway, David Grinnell, and Richard Oestreicher of the University of Pittsburgh have collected and preserved many pieces of ephemera from 20th-century left-wing social and political movements. In this interview, Galloway and Grinnell make the case for the importance of ephemera as a scholarly resource. They also discuss the emergence of this archive out of Oestreicher’s private collection of research materials, highlighting the fecundity of archivist–academic collaborations. 

📻 Golden Age of Black Radio 

“Golden Age of Black Radio” is an exhibit from Indiana University’s Archives of African American Music and Culture. Radio, another ephemeral format, offers a rich field for studying the sounds and conversations of a specific era, and co-curators Brenda Nelson-Strauss and William R. Vanden Dries created a series of exhibits based around Black radio station and disc jockeys from the 1920s to 1970s. This interview with Nelson-Strauss offers background on the Black radio, including some of its major figures and its importance, and also the challenges of creating a digital exhibit—which by its nature strongly favors visuals—that centers on audio. 

🗣️ View all Ask an Archivist interviews

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