Recording History

The majority of my job is taking recorded history and preserving it and making it available for all to use. But more and more I feel a responsibility to get more involved in the recording of history via audiovisual means to ensure accessibility, and frankly to make less work for the archivists of the future (trust me, there will still be plenty of things to do). UBalt and Langsdale Library have been doing this together for quite some time in their creation and collection of oral histories. An oral history is "a method of gathering, preserving, and interpreting the voices and memories of people, communities, and participants in past events" as it is defined by the Oral History Association. 

Eleven oral history collections are housed in the Langsdale Library Special Collections Department--six of which were organized and recorded by UBalt students and faculty. In addition to recorded interviews, the oral history collections sometimes include typewritten transcriptions, biographical summaries of interviewees, interview time tables, and photographs donated by interviewees. All of these document Baltimore City communities and organizations and many can be accessed online.

You have an amazing capacity for recording history literally in your pocket: your mobile smart phone. Much recent attention has been brought to utilizing your smart phone as a tool for citizen journalism with the documentation of events following the shooting and death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. To take that one step further: not only can a citizen with a smart phone become a journalist, but they can also be a historical documentarian and archivist at the same time. As is described by the group Activist Archivists, "Media is used to inform and inspire people to action, record the history of social movements and positive change, document abuses of power, and enables the eyes of the world to help protect activists on the ground." This group worked in collaboration with Witness, an international organization that trains and supports people using video in their fight for human rights, to create seven tips for making your videos discoverable and usable in the long term.

Check out those tips and contact me if you would like more information on this topic at shagan@ubalt.edu. And one tip from an Audiovisual Archivist: try to remember to flip your phone to the "widescreen", horizontal position--you will capture more visual information that way and it will look a lot better on the Internet. Take for example this recent cell phone video of new University of Baltimore President Kurt Schmoke and students Michelle Richardson, Nyshe Green and Jasmine Gibson's #IceBucketChallenge.

Post by University of Baltimore.

 

Happy documenting!

<<Siobhan Hagan, Audiovisual Archivist

Baltimore in Shades of Grey

A few days have passed since the closing night of the 16th annual Maryland Film Festival (MFF), and the overall consensus seems that it was a huge success--despite lacking The Charles as a venue. In its stead, there were several new venues, one of which was the Langsdale Library Auditorium.

On our blog, we have previously discussed the illustrious cinematic history of the auditorium, but today I would like to discuss another film that premiered in the Landsdale Library Auditorium during MFF: BALTIMORE IN BLACK IN WHITE (2014). A documentary feature, co-directed by Emily Topper and Mary Posatko, it focuses on one of the filmmakers themselves. Emily Topper was born and raised in the Edmondson Village neighborhood of Baltimore, and the film follows her and her crew through the maze of grief and memory in search of answers to the 1972 murder of her grandfather.

The filmmakers create a sense of place without using archival footage or very many historical photographs. There is present-day footage of the specific landmarks involved in the story, along with a few family pictures from the time. It was less a historical documentary, and more of historiographical process: they try to find the transcripts of the trial, but they were lost in a flood at the Maryland State Archives; they try to conduct interviews of those who attended the trial and lived through the aftermath, but they find that firsthand accounts are often biased and changeable. One of the only interviews of a non-directly-involved participant is that of former Baltimore City Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, who grew up in Edmondson Village during the time, and (side note) who has just been announced this morning as the new President of the University of Baltimore.

There isn't necessarily a strict conclusion to the documentary, and all of its players come across much more complex than initially introduced, and historical truth as much less (dare I write it?) black and white, more a limited smattering of shades of grey.

<<Siobhan Hagan, AV Archivist

Staff Perspective: On Archives and Community Engagement

Photo by Eli Pousson

I work in Special Collections at Langsdale and I'm being honest when I say that I love what I do. It's my job to help make archives more accessible to students, researchers, and local communities through digital initiatives. Sharing really cool stuff from the stacks of the archives means using my creativity and engaging the historical imaginations of others. But the work of digital collections is behind the scenes work, and serving digital content to online audiences can lack the kind of face to face dialogue that generates new ideas.

That's why I'm so grateful to be working on an oral history project in Station North this spring that allows me to represent the library and engage with local artists and community members to record their histories. The contributions of the people I've interviewed so far are tremendous, and their willingness to share their stories continues to amaze me. As an archivist, my job is to collect, describe, preserve, and provide access to unique materials. As an archivist actively collecting oral histories, this project of asking questions and listening very closely to the answers is teaching me about memory, engagement, community, and the process of meaning-making. It is learning through dialogue.

As much as I look to the web to learn and communicate, there is truly no substitute for face to face interaction. The process of going out and asking people to share their histories is challenging and potentially transformative, because it connects me to people and places, past and present, in ways I might otherwise miss. It also connects the archives to people and places, past and present. Is meaning-making a legitimate archival endeavor? I'm all ears.

Aiden Faust

Oral History: Station North

From the upcoming Langsdale Link:

Aiden Faust, digital collections librarian in Special Collections, has received a Baltimore Renaissance Seed Scholars Fund Grant for his proposed oral history project to document the involvement of artists in the development of the Station North Arts and Entertainment District of Central Baltimore.

Ten years have passed since one hundred acres of the Charles North and Greenmount West neighborhoods were officially designated the Station North Arts and Entertainment District. Station North represents a collaborative effort on the part of state and local governments and institutions to transform a former industrial area of Central Baltimore through culture-led revitalization.

Aiden will interview artists who have collectively purchased their live/work studio spaces in the area. After researching and interviewing participants, the audio recordings will be transcribed and archived in the Special Collections Department at Langsdale Library. Multimedia elements of the project will be incorporated into a web presence that will make these oral histories available for future use by students, researchers, and the general public.