Building a Community Data Curation Practice

MITH wants everyone in our community to stay healthy and the best way to do that right now is to avoid meetings or gatherings. With sadness, we canceled the final two Digital Dialogues of the Spring 2020 season. We will work with Jennifer Garcon on a plan to speak at a later date. In support of the Re/Member Black Philadelphia project, Garcon launched a community data curation pilot in partnership with the Free Library of Philadelphia. The goal of the community-rooted digitization project was to create access pathways to historical records from under-documented communities by producing digital surrogates and offering consultation to expand the life of materials held within the communities of color. As Philadelphia gentrifies at a faster rate than San Francisco, well-resourced institutions need to develop inclusive practices that support on-going community archival efforts. This talk discusses the experience of building an institutional practice that foregrounds partnership and resource sharing in developing digital archives.