This presentation explores an ongoing project to incorporate digital repository building for community archives within a master's level library and information sciences classroom. The class taught under the pedagogical methods of service learning highlighted (and continues to highlight) the complex relationship between proprietary technology and archival 'best practices.' By reimagining this relationship, students were able to look at how open source tools and technologies better accomplished their desired outcomes to build a small-scale repository for their community partner, one whose narratives and materials were representative of feminist activism in the American South.

1. Making MLIS Classrooms Open Source:
Activism, Service Learning, and Building
Digital Community Archives
Travis L. Wagner and Elise Lewis; The University of South Carolina
Twitter: @trlwagner

2. Objectives
● Reflect up how the ‘traditional’ MLIS classroom looks/operates
○ Consider challenge of skill-building for MLIS students
● Examine rhetorics of ‘best practices’ as to theories of digital archiving
● Focus on relationship between technology and job training for traditional archival work
○ Highlight reliance on antiquated for content management and anxieties of digital preservation
● Analyze the emergence of community archives
○ Consider the responses to community archives from traditional archives
● Rethink idea of ‘failure’ within these contexts
● Look towards the MLIS classroom as a place to learn through praxis (ie. Service Learning)
○ Focus on shifts in pedagogy from theory to actuality
● Discuss an ongoing project titled “Archiving SC Woman” as a digital community archive
○ Emphasize the classroom experience
● Identify the role open source technologies and practices play within this project and the
project’s future

7. Best Practices?

8. More like Father Knows
Best Practices...

10. Best Practices are always
not intersectional

21. Community Archives read as…
● Disorganized
● Lacking in provenance
● Working on a shoestring budgets
● Open to security threats
● Lacking in ‘up-to-date’ technology
● Staffed by non-information professionals
● Too niche to be useful
● Challenging to use for potential
patrons/researchers
● FAKE
● Bound for failure

24. “Service-learning courses emphasize hands-on tasks
that address real-world concerns as a venue for
educational growth. The service experience provides a
context for testing, observing, or trying out
discipline-specific and theory-based theories, concepts,
and skills. Through reciprocal learning and community
engagement, service-learning helps prepare students to
be full and responsible participants in both their
profession and their communities.” (About Service
Learning, 2016)

26. Test Limits of
Theory
Actually Practice
Archiving Skills

28. Other Women Heard About this Collection
● Barbara Moxen, former Chair of Women on Boards and
Commissions
● Becky Bailey, former President of American Association of
University Women
● Julie Lumpkin, former Director of Women’s Health at DHEC
● Phyllis Miller Mayes, former Director of Human Resources for SC
● Ann Humphries, former author and public speaker
● Promised: Janice Trawick, former advisor to Governor Carroll
Campbell

30. http://archivingscwomen.sclibsci.org

31. Structure of the Course
● 10 Students (IN PERSON!)
● 5 classes (≈ 7 hours) [lost one day]
● Given a pre-existing template of a Wordpress site to work with
● Students volunteered to be in one of three groups: Metadata; Documentation;
Digitization; and free-floating group working on Wordpress design
● Students given free range to create standards and approaches to digital content
creation and management
● Students had to communicate their work/choices to Dr. Waters throughout

32. Best
Reality Practices
What would be helpful to know
planning a project
● Use personalities as a strength
● Communicate with all stakeholders
● Leaving behind best practices will
hurt
● Bring in practitioners
● Flexibility is essential
● Benefits of practical experiences
● Facilitate reflection
● Know there will be conflicts
● Realize the pervasive nature of
privilege and oppression

36. ● Literally: No, but also yes
● Figuratively: Absolutely
● Pushing students and community archives to think about content management and
collection building digitally
● Rethinking archival standards to be more inclusive and accessible (via free blogging
platforms; app-based digitization, documentation via shareable platforms, etc.)
● Makes the class project approach one that must be translatable beyond a single project
● Opens up lines of communication for what works for practitioners and non-practitioners
alike
● Emphasis on scalability
● Welcomes failure as useful and generative
But is this Open Source?

37. Practical and Ethical Issues Encountered by Students
● Benefits of an in-person course in a predominately distance-learning
program
● Community archives
○ Working outside of traditional repositories
○ Doing the best you can with what you have
● Helped alleviate the feeling of partaking in “amatuer hour”
● Implications of existing standards on an openly feminist project

38. Conclusion
● Work in Progress
● The community collections are not currently intersectional
● Has been incorporated into two classroom settings: SLIS 777: Design and Management
of Digital Image Collections; SLIS 450: Information Issues in Cultural Heritage
Institutions
● Other ideal courses for the project: SLIS 735: Metadata; SLIS 766: Collection
Development and Acquisition and SLIS 725: Digital Libraries
● Also potentially applicable for internship projects for both SLIS and WGST courses
● Will explore this service learning approach in an entirely online course this fall
● Model already being replicated with the Queer Cola Oral History and Digital Archive
Project (QCOHDAP)
● At the very least the project reimagines the classroom in radical ways

39. Thanks
Twitter: @trlwagner
Email: travis.l.wagner@gmail.com
http://archivingscwomen.sclibsci.org