Podcast 109: Expanding the Louisiana Digital Library Collections with the Y’ALL Award

The Preservation Technology Podcast Episode 109

Catherine Cooper speaks with Sophie Ziegler and Leah Duncan at the Louisiana State University Library about their work on the Y'ALL initiative to increase the diversity of the Louisiana Digital Library holdings.

The Preservation Technology Podcast is a series about the people and projects that bring innovation to preservation. Read articles based on episodes, listen, or subscribe. This podcast is produced by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT).

This is the Preservation Technology Podcast, bringing innovation to preservation. The Preservation Technology Podcast is a production of the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, a unit of the National Park Service.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: My name’s Dr. Catherine Cooper, I am here with…

Sophie Ziegler: Sophie Ziegler, Head of Visual Programs and Services at LSU libraries.

Leah Duncan: And I’m Leah Duncan, I’m the Digital Collections Librarian at LSU Libraries.

Sophie Ziegler, Head of Visual Programs and Services at Louisiana State University libraries

LSU Libraries

Introducing the Louisiana Digital Library and the Y’ALL Award

Sophie Ziegler: So, what we want to talk about today is the Y’ALL Award is what we call it and this is an opportunity for LSU Libraries to help smaller cultural heritage institutions around the state have their materials digitized and uploaded to the Louisiana Digital Library.

For a bit of background, the Louisiana Digital library is our state’s front door to our digital cultural heritage. We are the technical home here at LSU, but it’s a collaborative effort between LSU libraries and right now, about 30 other institutions throughout the state.

So, we have archives, and museums and libraries, government repositories, religious collections, etcetera. We work on joint projects, and we have a really good time, and what we’re trying to do with the Y’ALL Award is to make sure it’s as geographically and content diverse as possible within the LDL.

Leah Duncan, Digital Collections Librarian at Louisiana State University Libraries

LSU Libraries

You Are Louisiana's Legacy

Sophie Ziegler: The Y’ALL Award is an acronym for the You Are Louisiana’s Legacy.

Leah Duncan: That is correct…

Sophie Ziegler: …that is correct, we are proud of that. Thank you for asking.

Leah Duncan: There was a lot of worse acronyms that came up as ideas for this Y’all Award name. I think I remember the CRAW--the Crawfish Award, which was going to be Creating something…archival materials, I don’t remember but Y’ALL is better.

Sophie Ziegler: So, we got the Y’ALL Award. It’s an opportunity for cultural heritage institutions around the state of Louisiana to apply to have one of two options: the first being the Mobile Digitization Lab in which folks here from LSU Libraries, we will pack up our digitization equipment, including flatbed scanners and overhead cameras and lighting apparatus and drive over to a host institution and digitize a selection of materials that is identified by the host institution.

The second option is what we call the Open Digitization Lab, where we invite members of other institutions to come and use our digitization space here at LSU libraries.

And the idea with both of these is that LSU has the staff and the equipment to do digitization that we know most other places don’t that we want to deal with, so we are looking for opportunities to share it.

Leah Duncan: Theoretically what I like especially about the Y’ALL Award is that it’s usually larger and more well-funded institutions that have the expertise and technology to be able to create these digital collections, but there are a lot of valuable historic materials held by these smaller cultural heritage institutions, and of course they should keep holding them. Right. So, being able to have a way to present these materials and provide them a way to preserve them digitally is something I’m really proud of.

Leah Duncan and Gabe Harrell working with the mobile digitization set up.

LSU Libraries

Starting a Project During the Pandemic

Dr. Catherine Cooper: When did the Y’ALL project start and what is the duration or how do you see it progressing from here?

Sophie Ziegler: It started right before the pandemic…

Leah Duncan: …oh yeah.

Sophie Ziegler: …yes, as a lot of these things do, it took a while to get the paperwork in order, it took a while to get all the stakeholders on board. We were relying on our neighbors and colleagues from across the country to help us. We spent a lot of time talking with people from the Mississippi Digital Library, who do very similar things with some key differences. And they were very kind enough to show us how they set their project up and all the paperwork that they have etcetera. We talked to people at Georgia Homeplace who does a variation of this, so we were able to rely on them a lot.

And then we did our first pilot of the Mobile Digitization Lab in November of 2019. We got their stuff up online where you can see it now. It was from the Jeanerette Museum in beautiful Jeanerette, Louisiana. It’s up in the Louisiana Digital Library now and then of course, Covid hit so we haven’t done anything since then.

The application remains open. We do have our next project lined up with the River Road African American Museum in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. We’re trying to be very slow to make sure everybody is comfortable with the level of personal interaction that this type of thing takes.

The Future of the Y’ALL Award

Sophie Ziegler: To the future, I feel like all that’s left now is to really smooth out the edges. So, the pilot project allowed us to understand what it takes to get material to a host institution, what it looks like to have our staff in hotels etcetera, local enough that they can get back to the site institution every day at a reasonable time. And we get a lot of those logistics done, it’s going to be tweaked as needed with every new opportunity. But moving forward, we just hope to make it routine.

So, moving forward what we want to do is think about how to de-center LSU from being the center. Right now, this is an LSU project. It is all LSU people going out. It’s mostly LSU people evaluating applications, but the LDL just has again, almost 30 members, so what we really would like to do is think about dividing up the state geographically so that LSU doesn’t necessarily have to drive. For instance, in Natchitoches, we could rely on a member institution closer.

And that’s really what we’re hoping to do. We don’t know what that will look like, whether or not that will look like us investing, us being the LDL community, investing in digitization shops scattered around, whether or not this would like one central digitization lab set up that we can drive around. But that’s our hope is to really bring in more people, to make it more collaborative.

Leah Duncan: And sort of thinking about the future of this project and the afterlife of these collections, we think a lot in the LDL about collections as data. And we are recently part of a grant project that focused on collections as data and thinking about how to make your collections available as data and to create workloads and use cases around that.

So, a big part of my job is basically trying to get people to do cool things with our collections, whether that’s digital humanities projects or teaching or various types of, again, like data analysis around our collections.

One thing I think a lot about is no one can do anything with a collection, especially computationally, that’s not there yet. So, the content of what’s available in your digital library really does affect the scholarship and the teaching of the future as we move forward. And we saw that a lot during the pandemic. We had to do a lot of adjustments when our institutions closed down, to facilitate courses and instructors who were relying on our archival materials to help them pivot towards using digital archival materials. So, the more sort of diverse content that’s available, the more diverse and representative teaching and research that can be done in the future, and I get excited about that.

Expanding the Louisiana Digital Library Collections

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Are there particular areas you would like to see the LDL expand toward?

Sophie Ziegler: Yeah, so there are a couple different ways to think about this. One of the ways that we tend to phrase it is, if we think about the Louisiana Digital Library as a representation of Louisiana, Louisiana would look a lot whiter than it is, it would look a lot older than it is.

Leah Duncan: More urban than it is.

Sophie Ziegler: We know from working in institutions what people are likely to scan and put into a digital library. So, you’ve got a lot of photographs of people shaking each other’s hands on the steps of a capitol, like we do. We have a lot of politicians, we have a lot of well-to-do families, but what we don’t have is a lot of everyone else who lives here and has always lived here.

So, we’re thinking about African American centric collections in which they’re actually centered, right, and not represented as enslaved individuals. We’re thinking about all the other groups that are here and have been here for generations and just don’t tend to make it into the local repository.

So again, if you think about something like the Louisiana Digital Library, it’s always going to be a selection of a selection. We’re always working with what’s already been collected by somebody and then on top of that, what repositories consider important enough to put the resources in to scan.

So, what we’re hoping to do is, if we can take on the burden of the digitization and leave the selection to the host institution. Then what we’re hoping to do is put people in the position where they don’t have to be making this cost benefit analysis. Rather they can just say, “This is what we’d really love to have up, this is what’s really important to our community.” And then those of us coming in from LSU can be the ones who actually take on the burden of doing the work itself.

This is to make the LDL a better representation of Louisiana and this is to make the collections within the LDL fuller so that you can do more things with it as Leah was saying. But this is also just an existential issue in the sense that we’re losing ground and we’re more likely to be hit by a hurricane every single year.

We’re in a race to hold onto our cultural heritage and almost all of our institutions, for one reason or another, whether it be funding or hurricanes and flooding. I think it remains to be seen in the deep future as to whether or not digitization is actually the way, a long-term solution in any way to this, but I think in the short term, it gives us a certain focus and a certain urgency to this type of work.

LSU Library staff and museum volunteers review collections for future digitization.

LSU Libraries

Applying for the Y’ALL

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Have there been other applications that have come in, are you looking for more people to apply?

Sophie Ziegler: Yeah, we’re definitely looking for more people to apply. We weren’t pushing it during most of the last year for Covid reasons. We started pushing it just a couple of months ago with conference presentations and other outreach forms, specifically to the archives and museum communities here in Louisiana.

So, we’re definitely taking applications. We’re trying to keep the application as minimal as possible. We do ask that applicants think about the material that’s either completely owned by them or that they have rights to post the materials online.

We prioritize collections that represent geographies not currently represented in the LDL or communities not currently represented and we are willing to help think out how much can be digitized over the course of a week. Which again, is one of the harder things.

So, one of the big things we want to say is that we’re always happy to talk to applicants at any point during it. Our contact information is available on the application. If anybody starts and has questions, we do hope that they’ll reach out to us. If anybody is thinking about applying, we’re always happy to talk about projects and try to do the best that we can to make it a successful application.

It’s set up as an award right now for a number of reasons. That’s not because we don’t want to give it out. We have it set up as an award in the hopes that there will be a lot of internal reflection on anybody that applies. So, we want the partner institution to tell us what’s important about their collection that should be digitized. So, we ask them to think about their community that they serve and to think about what they would be really, really upset about, what would be the most detrimental to their community should there be a fire or a flood at their shop.

So, it was setup as an award so we can have that type of structure where they can answer those types of questions for us in advance. And also because we think, and we’ve been told by Mississippi Digital Library and other people we talked to, the award is sort of a nice way for the partner institution to sort of brag. We’re thinking about maybe having plaques and again just to make sure that everybody is really feeling good about the project.

Louisiana State University Library Digitization staff with museum volunteers

LSU Libraries

An Intentional, Hopeful Project

Sophie Ziegler: I think a good place to leave this, at least from my point of view, would be to reiterate that the Louisiana Digital Library is a joint effort. A lot of the work going on in it is community building work. It wouldn’t be any good for those of us at LSU, which is just one member of the Louisiana Digital Library, to decide that this is important work.

Instead, what we’ve been doing is spending a lot of time building capacity among all the members of the LDL and hearing about what everybody has in their collections, what everybody would like to see the LDL become and all to move in the same direction. Because nothing we’re saying here is novel. I mean Mississippi has had a digitization project like this for exactly the same reason for years and so many other states also. It’s not that it’s novel, I think what’s so exciting is that it’s actually happening and it’s happening in a very intentional way where we’re naming what we’re trying to overcome.

We want a digital library that is more inclusive because we have such a beautifully diverse state and I think we’re doing everyone a disservice if we’re not able to represent that.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for talking about this project and I look forward to seeing where it goes.

Sophie Ziegler: Thank you so much for having us. This was a lot of fun.

Leah Duncan: Yeah, that was fun.

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