14th Annual Conference
#DCConference20
via Zoom Webinar
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PANEL A:
Politics, Privacy, and Ethics in Digital Collections
While traditional collection development has always been fraught with questions of relevance, appropriateness, and selection bias, the awesome power of the internet has made the process even thornier for creating digital collections. This panel will attempt to address difficult questions in digitization and collection building from legal, practical, and ethical perspectives, including: How have issues such as privacy, copyright, and context been amplified in a digital context? Are our traditional library values and practices of selection and description still sufficient in the current political and social climate? Do our collection development and digitization plans reflect the needs and expectations of our communities? Are we justified in creating digital collections of materials that may never have been intended for preservation or widespread dissemination? How can the cultural heritage context of a digital collection be maintained in the face of current online behavior patterns? During the first half of the session each panelist will offer a 5 minute overview of a specific challenge they currently face and then will engage one another in a moderated discussion. The second half of the session will be devoted to Q&A with the audience.
Panelists
Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello is Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies and Coordinator of the American Studies program at Salem State University. She is a publicly-engaged interdisciplinary scholar/social-justice activist with nearly twenty years of experience linking the higher education, museum, social service, K-12, service-learning and cultural sectors in both the US and Europe. She was the Founding University Fellow for Service-Learning at Salem State. Her interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship engages the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, immigration, religion, place-making and social justice. She is currently leading a 2-year NPS/OAH-funded project trace African American history in Essex County, building on her work as Director and advisor for a series of Teaching American History projects in the 2000s. Her 2018 monograph Modern Bonds links literary theory, art history and sociology/urban studies to explore how the concept of community was transformed in the early twentieth century in the U.S. She is the recipient of two Fulbright fellowships (in Luxembourg and Greece) and a Whiting Fellowship (in Cote D’Ivoire) She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and undergraduate degrees in History and Sociology. She relies on digital archives to provide source material for the American Studies program at Salem State and over the past two decades has created digital collections and led students in digital humanities projects tied to issues of food justice, migration/immigration and the “Global US/Global Salem”.
Eben English currently serves as Digital Repository Services Manager at the Boston Public Library, and is the main technical lead for the Digital Commonwealth repository system. Prior to this position, he worked in academic libraries at Loyola University Chicago and Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, focusing on digital collection development and library website design. He holds an MLIS from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Jane Kelly is the Records and Accessioning Archivist at Tufts' Digital Collections & Archives. Prior to that she was the Web Archiving Assistant for the #metoo Digital Media Collection at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. In that role, she identified material for inclusion in the collection, conducted web crawls, created descriptive metadata, and researched issues related to ethics in social media archiving. She received her MSLIS at the iSchool at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2018.
Elizabeth Watts Pope is curator of books and digitized collections at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass. Her work aims to connect people to their history by providing access to printed and digitized sources, especially focusing on under-documented groups. Elizabeth promotes, makes accessible, and builds upon the strengths of the Society’s unparalleled collection of early American books and pamphlets. She works closely with digitization partners to make AAS collection material as widely available as possible. Her previous position at the Society was as the head of readers' services; prior to that she worked in acquisitions at AAS and in the archives at the Dodd Center at the University of Connecticut. She has an M.A. in History from the University of Connecticut.