Greetings from the Rock County Historical Society in Janesville, WI! My name is Kristin Arnold, and I am the archives manager at RCHS, where I work alongside dedicated volunteers and innovative staff members. One of the most exciting projects happening at RCHS is the Story Squad program, led by our insightful and gracious History Teller, Teresa Nguyen. What started out as a spark of an idea by former RCHS Executive Director, Mike Reuter, in early 2017 has evolved into a far-reaching, impactful effort to share the stories of Rock County residents. Stories are continually collected through short written accounts on our “Story Cards” as well as in-depth interviews available on the RCHS website.
As Teresa collected more and more stories at community events and through her interviews, she began to record much of the audio content in order to work more efficiently. Consequently, RCHS has the beginnings of a fantastic audio collection in addition to the digitized Story Cards and the interviews on the website! We knew that this content was too valuable to lose, so when we learned about the opportunity to participate in CCDC, we decided to pursue the digital preservation of the Story Squad collection.
We were fortunate to have Sarah Lange from the UW-Madison iSchool join us this summer to evaluate the Story Squad collection and figure out what our next steps should be to ensure the long-term preservation of the material. What we have is essentially the start of an oral history program, so Sarah researched best practices for collecting oral history content, and she created a handbook for us to follow as we obtain the content and later ingest the material into our archives. Additionally, she drafted a digital preservation policy as a guide to help RCHS stay committed to digital preservation.
Most of the artifacts that the archive currently holds are paper-based, so we had not previously outlined any policies regarding digital content. However, it won’t be long until we will need to address digital content on a larger scale. Therefore, I’m glad that the efforts to preserve the Story Squad collection will help us think about the preservation of other collections as well.
One of the things I’ve really appreciated about the CCDC program is its focus on smaller heritage institutions. Often when I learn about digital preservation techniques, the information I receive is so general or more appropriate for larger institutions with a dedicated IT staff. It has been so helpful to communicate with our mentor, Stacey Erdman, and the CCDC coordinators because they’ve suggested solutions that can actually be implemented at RCHS. This summer has been a great opportunity to learn what digital preservation can look like at an institution like ours.
— Posted by Kristin Arnold, Archives Manager, Rock County Historical Society
Curating Community Digital Collections is supported by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, #RE-85-17-0127-17.
