Case Study 

Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage: The Preservation of the Latina/o Legacy / Carolina Villarroel and Gabriela Baeza Ventura

 

This case study gives a brief overview of a long-standing archival and research project in Latina/o history, Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, which was established in 1990 by a group of scholars, librarians, and archivists. It outlines the scope, effort, and community-building that it takes to create a long-running and successful project, and can be used to focus on the care that it takes to steward such large-scale recovery projects forward. It also shows the clear and concrete way that this archive formed the locus of a research community and prompted new types of scholarship.

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Case Study 

Design for Diversity: The Case of Ed / Alex Gil

 

In this case study, Gil gives a short description of the design philosophies behind Ed, a system for producing online digital editions. These design philosophies focus on the concept of minimal computing, which includes a holistic analysis of overall system costs in creating and, as importantly, maintaining online resources. The minimal computing approach analyzes these overall costs in the context of historical and current global inequalities in access to resources, including technologies, and suggests a way forward that increases local control while decreasing long-term maintenance costs.

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Case Study 

Mapping Violence: A Case Study on Project Development, Iterative Approaches to Data Collection and Visualization, and Collaborative Work With Undergraduates / Jim McGrath

 

This case study looks at an important benchmark in the development of Mapping Violence, a digital project interested in histories and records of state-sanctioned racial violence on the Mexico/Texas border in the early twentieth century. Specifically, it focuses on work completed in the summer of 2016 with a team of undergraduates at Brown University, documenting some of the collaborative, iterative, pedagogical, and ethical dimensions of the project’s ideas of data, interface, and audience.
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Case Study 

Minding and Mending the Gaps: A Case Study in Linked Open Data / Karen Li-Lun Hwang

 

This case study provides a concrete example of the gaps that can occur in standard cataloging practices and their impact on information seeking. It explores an instance of using Linked Open Data (LOD) technologies to address representation gaps, uncovering both opportunities and risks when such interlinking relies on standard vocabularies, which typically represent only mainstream narratives.

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Case Study 

Honoring the Dead: A Digital Archive of the Insane Indian Asylum / Stacey Berry

 

This case study describes the development of a digital collection focused on a federal detention facility for Native Americans, where the project managers were not from a Native American background. They describe their process of working closely with representatives from the Keepers of the Canton Native Asylum Story, a group of Native Americans stewarding the history and legacy of the asylum in South Dakota, and how they worked to make sure the digital collection and its display are in service to the Native cultural perspective.
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Case Study 

Using Static Sites Technology for Increased Access: The Case of the Shelley-Godwin Archive / Raffaele Viglianti

 

This case study discusses the key decisions in adopting standards and technologies for a digitization project, in dialogue with ongoing scholarship around minimal computing and minimal editions. It has a specific focus on choices that affect long-term preservation and access, including efforts to enable offline use of the archive in order to increase its availability to a larger number of communities with variable access to the Internet.
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Case Study 

Participation, Design, Empathy, Justice: The User Experience with Underrepresented Populations (UXUP) Project / Scott Young

 

This case study discusses a Participatory Design pilot project at Montana State University: User Experience with Underrepresented Populations (UXUP), in which Native American students and a librarian co-created a new community outreach tool. It provides an in-depth view into the UXUP design process, with further discussion of outcomes, limitations, assessments, and recommendations for implementing Participatory Design practices with Indigenous communities.

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Case Study 

Digitizing and Enhancing Description Across Collections to Make African American Materials More Discoverable on Umbra Search African American History / Dorothy Berry

 

This case study describes a project undertaken at the University of Minnesota Libraries to digitize materials related to African American materials across the Universities holdings, and to highlight materials that are otherwise undiscoverable in existing archival collections. It explores how historical and current archival practices marginalize material relevant to African American history and culture, and how a mass digitization process can attempt to highlight and re-aggregate those materials. The details of the aggregation process — e.g. the need to use standardized vocabularies to increase aggregation even when those standardized vocabularies privilege majority representation — also reveal important issues in mass digitization and aggregation projects involving the history of marginalized groups.

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