>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. >> Elizabeth Peterson: All right everyone get your coffee, settle in. I'm glad to see most of you back here today for the second day of our symposium; Collections, Collaborations and Connections. I think we had a fabulous day. I know the staff felt very good yesterday about a lot of the discussion and I'm really thrilled to see so many people kind of connecting, meeting each other. Researchers talking with archivists. Imagine. So, we've got another fabulous day. Again, I think focusing on our collections and in particular we're going to be really zeroing in on the wax cylinder collections of Native American material. And you'll be meeting some of the partners that we're working with these days. And I think going to find out about a really exciting project, a development that I think in some ways kind of brings the federal cylinder project, which a few people referenced yesterday, brings it into the 21st-century. But before we do that, we're going to hear a little bit more about the wax cylinder collections from Judith Gray, our senior reference specialist. Judith. [ Applause ] >> Judith Gray: Good morning and welcome to all of you. Actually, I'm taking as my role, to set the stage even broader for what the center has been about. What the library has been about with its Native American collections. I started looking back and realized that probably the very earliest field recordings that we received that are tribal based came in July1936 when Helen Roberts; Helen Heffron Roberts gave the library disk copies of her Luiseño cylinder recordings that she had made in Pechanga, California in 1926. So, interestingly enough, the first part of this whole discussion has to do with migrating of formats. And so, the very first recordings, field recordings, that we received here were already a migrated format. She gave us the disc copies, rather than the cylinders. Although the cylinders themselves came later. We then go three years later, when Willard Rhodes, a music professor at Columbia University started about a 15-year project. He had been hired by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to go out in the summers and to record contemporary native song traditions. And he went all over the US in different years and collected many, many, many disc recordings all through the 40s. While the recordings were made for the Bureau of Indian affairs there was some sort of an agreement that they would be promptly deposited in the Library of Congress. They are some of the most; some of the best audio quality ones that we have that are early in that period. Then we have 1942, a rather interesting year as it turns out. Smack in the middle of World War II. But it was in that year in April when Alan Lomax recorded the Isleta Pueblo here in the library's recording studio. All through the decades and such, many of the early cylinder recordings were actually made here in Washington DC, when people from visiting delegations were recorded here. And in fact, I believe we are essentially directly over the place where many early recordings were made. Alice Fletcher had a townhouse, in this block on the side of the street back in the 1890s. And she recorded a great many people visiting at that point. So, I think the cylinders which were here, went elsewhere, and elsewhere, and elsewhere have come back home essentially. But we didn't get those cylinders themselves until significantly later. But back then, to 1942, so, April was when these Isleta Pueblo governor was recorded. In September, the library had already begun releasing sampler albums of recordings in its collections. And in that year, the predecessor of this; this is this is the LP version, but it would've been six 78s in an album, were released. The collection of William Fenton, "Song from The Iroquois Longhouse" recorded both in New York and in Canada. The project, or the recordings themselves were made in 1941. And that particular recording project was sponsored by the Bureau of American Ethnology and the Library of Congress. So, the library was already starting to gather tribal recordings at that point. That same summer, a woman named Henrietta Yurchenco documented Tarascan and mestizo music in Michoacán, Mexico. Those recordings, which came here, the Tarascan ones are perhaps the first non US field recordings of indigenous people that came here. While that particular project of hers was not done in direct consultation, or collaboration, with the library; her subsequent projects from 1944 to 1946 were sponsored by the Institute of [speaking in foreign language], and the Library of Congress. And in those years, she gathered documentation of Cora, Huichol, Seri, Yaqui, Tarahumara, Tzotzil, and Tzeltal songs. Then we get to 1948. One of the most significant collectors of field recordings up to that point for the Bureau of American Ethnology was a woman named Francis Densmore. The recordings; her cylinder recordings and those of many others made for the BAE had been transferred to the National Archives around the beginning of the decade. But Densmore really had hopes. She knew about the sampler disk publications at the library was releasing. She managed to pull enough strings and to influence enough people that it was at that point, 1948, when all of those early BAE cylinder recordings were transferred to the library in her hope there was that she would then be able to make the sampler recordings of the same sort that Fenton and others had done. To make those recordings available in that case, principally to educators, composers. She wanted the music, the music of America to be more broadly heard and understood. It was not however, project aimed at returning materials back to tribal communities. This was definitely outreach to other areas. So, after that, for the next couple of decades, certainly, the library was receiving collections that were tribally based. Materials then were being copied, but they were being copied by audio engineers who would've had no particular knowledge of what traditions they were working with. They would've had no particular documentation. So, it was sort of blind copying and sometimes that resulted in things being copied at incorrect speeds. Sometimes incorrect names being applied to collections. But it was an ongoing process. We then jump to 1976, and the creation of the American Folklife Center. And you've heard a lot about the field projects that were underway as soon as the center was created. But also, at that point, an early outreach project, the Federal Cylinder Project. And, well I came on in 1983, just at the time when a lot of the original cataloging and preservation had been done. And when people were starting to actually get into the process of dissemination. We got all sorts of good advice on how to do this, how to make this happen from various tribal experts. And in all we probably visited at least 50 communities. We sent materials to others. And at that point I was guesstimating that in the course of any particular year, we were in touch with representatives from at least 70 different communities. The big profit project though was with the Omaha tribe. And here, both Alan Jabbour and Carl Fleischhauer had a big hand working directly with the tribe. Going back and forth, bringing tribal representatives, especially the tribal historian, Dennis Hastings, here to DC. And going, having people going out and documenting the annual powwows in Macy, Nebraska. So, that interchange, but that was then definitely designed to return materials to the communities, to the community of origin in this case. So, in trying to set this up for what you're going to be hearing about FCP 2.0, as I've been hearing it called. At that point then, through the original cylinder project, we were working very much sort of outreach from here to the communities. And trying to find out what they needed, trying to provide technical assistance, trying to provide the materials themselves. But then, I think things sort of shifted. At that point, into the 90s and more recently, it's been much more a process of collaboration, and a process of having people decide when they need water from us. We can provide whatever they are asking for, but it comes, the initiation of most of these projects since then, has come from the tribes themselves, from the communities, from individuals who are the culture keepers. And meanwhile, what we've been doing is having more and more collaborations with the National Park Service on the historic preservation grants to tribes with keepers of the treasures, was another aspect of that. You heard yesterday about Breath of Life. Many more partnerships being established between agencies, between archives and between communities where the materials belong. And it is that which is so exciting to hear about the next project. So, with that, I turn it over to you. [ Applause ] >> Guha Shankar: So, while; hi I'm Guha Shankar, good morning, thank you for coming. While I have Judith here, I thought I would do something that just gives me great pleasure. I think it will provide you with some insight into the work that she does. I have a visual aid. This is somewhat bedraggled bag, it's from the Association of Tribal Archives Libraries and Museums, which is an organization dedicated to bringing together professionals from across indigenous communities around the world, every year in an annual conference. Now ATALM every year starting in 2007, identifies and recognizes organizations and individuals who serve as outstanding examples of how individuals archives, libraries, museums, and individuals contribute to the vitality and cultural sovereignty of native nations. The guardian award which they give out, takes its name from the sculpture that stands atop the Oklahoma State Capitol, and honors the words of the seminal Chief Kelly Haney, who said, "Dream big, work hard, believe deeply for this is just the beginning. To that end, we have two former winners right up here on stage with us. In 2012, Kim Christen, here, took home the award for the Plateau People's Portal, web portal. An interactive online digital archive that provides access to Plateau people's culture and materials at Washington State University through tribal curation. And you'll hear more about all aspects of that a little later in this presentation. Last year, Donald Soctomah, to my far left, won the Lifetime Achievement Award for his work of significantly contributing to preservation understanding of indigenous cultural heritage. So, former winners. [ Applause ] And in 2016, when all of you I'm sure are going to be at the on Tuesday, October 11 at the Sheraton Grande Wild Horse resort and spa, you will be there obviously for the honoring ceremony for our very own, Dr. Judith Gray, who has won the 2016 Honored One Award from the Association of Tribal Archives Libraries and Museums. [ Applause ] >> Judith Gray: I was floored. I got the word yesterday. So, thank you to all and but it's you know, in being honored this way it's honoring the archives and the work we do. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Guha Shankar: All right, so. Now, to the panel at hand. And I'm going to spare you the details of these distinguished individuals' bios. You have them online, I'm sure you've consulted them eagerly over the course of the last week or so. But starting to my right Donald Soctomah, from Passamaquoddy Nation in Maine. James Francis from Penobscot Nation of Maine also. Jane Anderson from New York University and founder and developer of the Traditional Knowledge Labels through localcontext.org, which you'll hear about. And, the aforementioned Kim Christen who is from Washington State University and the conceptual genius behind the lucrative contact management system. So. Sorry, it's early in the morning, I've had too much coffee. So, I'm going to turn it over to them basically to tell you about this project that we've initiated called Ancestral Voices. It's a project that we started as a pilot project with the Passamaquoddy Nation of Maine. We initiated it about, we actually developed the program about four years ago under the behest of the former Library of Congress, Dr. James Billington. And we've carried that through in partnership with the very fine and expert staff at the National Audiovisual Conservation Center out in Culpeper, Virginia. The audio engineers have been working assiduously on the collection of Jesse Walter Fuchs is 1890 field recordings of Passamaquoddy people. We have, you know, taken at least the second pass on this particular set of materials, but 20th-century technology yielded reel to reel cassette, reel to reel tapes and cassettes. We have now gone back and transferred those materials using cutting edge tools in order to bring it into the digital domain. And you will hear an example of that when Donald speaks a little later in the presentation. This is a collaborative preservation digitization and access project, which consists essentially of, the central aspects involved, digitally reformatting analog media formats in order to recover and preserve the recorded voices of native peoples. To be developed curatorial protocols that address community cultural practices and perspectives regarding use and access to new cultural materials, as well as digital access tools that embed Native American cultural knowledge about and descriptions of the content of recordings and library collection records to the extent possible. I'm going to shoot forgo for now that we're talking about the work that the library has done in terms of digitization materials, but to tell you a little bit about the technology and have these folks explain in their own words what the digital tools enable us to do in terms of providing an interface between the library archives such as ourselves, and native peoples. Without necessarily calling into question our own methodologies. It must be said that there's a certain amount of agility which external parties can employ in terms of digital technologies which the library, for many reasons is not able to do. Not for lack of trying. But that's just the way the technology works to a certain extent. And one of the things which is amazing to me, is that of all the resources of the library are brought to bear on projects such as this, as you know, as Lyntha and Terry Eiler were saying yesterday, these materials have been lying around, and to paraphrase my colleague John Bishop's evocative words in a lead line vault somewhere out in Culpeper, Virginia. And 40 years later they're able to see the fruits of their work through the digitization project that Ann Hoog has been championing here at the library of the field surveys. Likewise, the materials which have been, the Fuchs recordings have a much older genealogy. But again, in the 21st century we're now able to hear some of the fruits of that digitization work and bring 1890s recordings up to date in 2016. Which I think is pretty fabulous, I mean 126 years after the fact is a pretty interesting stretch of time. So, this project's envision is a proof of concept. It's already bearing fruit and I'm going to just cut myself off there and turn it over to Kim who is going to start the proceedings. And we're going to go through with Kim, Jane, James, and then Donald. Take it away, Kim. >> Kim Christen: Okay, thank you, Guha. I am on. Thank you and Niki and Betsy wherever you are for the invitations. And a big congratulations to Judith. It's a well-deserved award and I know you were one of the first people I met here at the Library of Congress and you've been, I know you've just been working tirelessly on this stuff so, congratulations, well deserved. So, I am going to talk about Mukurtu CMS, which is a content management system, in just a moment, as Guha said. But I sort of also want to frame this. Ad we'll get talking about the larger project, and my piece in it in talking about Mukurtu, but I want to sort of frame that in thinking about sort of practices of representation. Where Mukurtu comes from. We didn't, just sort of it didn't come out of thin air. So, how is it that these histories of colonialism, and display, and archiving been interrupted by indigenous peoples in many ways. And so, I want to talk about that first. As you can see here, in Australia, aboriginal practices of masking, deleting or defaming images, objects and artifacts are quite common. This was, I first saw in Australia in, I believe this was in 1995 at Leroux, because an elder had passed away. The community members had gone in with duct tape, as you can see here, much to the dismay of some of the non-aboriginal curators. So, you can see this sort of very physical masking in public places. And this has been taken into the digital realm. We can see that, now you know it's very common at least in Australia to have these sorts of warnings that you'll see on websites, on books, on TVs. This one says, this may cause sadness and distress to aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. So, it's warning you before, if you want to go. Do you not want to see these images. In Canada, the Musqueam Indian Band's online place, name and archive exhibit requires visitors to accept their terms for viewing. And I love this because it's a twist on terms of service. This is their terms for viewing Musqueam places and hearing Musqueam stories in the Halkomelem? language. So, you actually have to accept, and only upon accepting, which includes being respectful and then not reproducing any portion of the site without permission. But it starts that you're actually, you know you're obliged to act in a certain way by accepting these terms. And so, I think whoever came up with that in the Musqueam Indian Band also deserves an award I think. Once you do click in, you can still only see some of the content, videos and maps. And you will hear them in the Halkomelem language. And sometimes not translated into English, which is another thing that you'll find on sites. It's that very disruption of what most internet viewers are expecting, is oh, I'm going to hear it in this language and then I'll be able to understand it. Well, no you won't. Or you can go and talk to somebody and learn about it. At the Northwestern Museum of Art and Culture in Spokane, where I work there is, I don't work at the Northwestern Museum Art and Culture, but in Spokane, there's a room where access to some materials are restricted to the general public. So, you can see sacred room restricted access. So, all of these, these are just a small sampling of what's out there when you start to look for these sort of interruptions to our viewing practices. They're sort of, they're visual reminders of that sort of really tactile material and embodied ethical practice about not seeing, and not retelling or retelling in a different way. And all of those, I think call into question our assumptions about knowledge acquisition. How we learn. We should be able to see to learn. Especially in archives, museums and libraries. These are very visual and oral places. And we're expecting those things to be open. So, what these actually help us think differently though about the circulation and access of content in archival collections and when they are digitized. So, Mukurtu CMS fits into this landscape of interruption and different modes of access and circulation by providing a tool that allows communities, however those communities are defined, to use their own protocols for viewing, sharing and managing digital materials. Mukurtu is the Warumungu word for dillybag. And the dillybag traditionally held sacred items. And the elders had to open up the dillybag for the younger generations. But the younger generations also had to ask and elicit those. And so, it's about a conversation. It wasn't about opening up or keeping closed, it was about that conversation. A dialogue and sharing cultural knowledge between generations about respect. And so, it was by the Warumungu elder that I worked with Michael Jampin Jones, said the dillybag is a safekeeping place. And he also wanted Mukurtu, the system we created in 2009 to be that same sort of safekeeping place that invites dialogue. That invites conversation. That's about sharing, but sharing in a proper way. And so, flash forward 8 years later, Mukurtu is now at a 2.0.5 as of three weeks ago release. Only those of you in the throes of software releases know that that really matters in any kind of way, but yeah us [laughter]. And is see out in the audience, too, a shout out to the multiple NEH and possibly IMLS maybe program officers who have been with us from the beginning, Joel Ruhl [assumed spelling] and others, thank you very much. We were funded initially by an NEH startup grant, and have been funded by IMLS over the last few years. And also, Library of Congress and AFC and Guha were one of the first to jump onto this notion, well how do we do this? How do we think about this in this other context? So, Mukurtu is now a free and open source piece of software that's now totally configurable. So, it started out for one community in the outback of Australia, 800 people serving a very specific need, with very specific protocols. So, how do we take that and scale that up so anyone can use that, any community can use that in conversation and in dialogue with other institutions with national repositories, etcetera. Because what we found, and what indigenous communities already knew is that a lot of those collections are out. They're in other places. That's the history of colonialism that we're talking about. The history of collection is the history of colonialism, right full-stop. So, how do we start there? Yes, how do we start there? So, how do we return these and return these in respectful ways. So, the basis of Mukurtu then is what we sort of lovingly call the three C's. So, within Mukurtu, there are communities. So, you can define those communities any way, then we'll hear from James and Donald and their work about thinking of this in their own communities. Communities can be 2 people, 50 people, 500, 5000; it doesn't matter. They're defined however you want to within Mukurtu, nothing comes predefined. The second thing is these cultural protocols. So, the communities are the who of Mukurtu, the cultural protocols are the how. And this is where it happens. How do you want those material accessed? So, we've seen lots of different cultural protocols over the years from communities, gender, kin, clans, medicine societies. And now that we're working with more tribal museums and archives, we're also seeing things like to be vetted, or tribal council, or you know curators. And then those can be layered. And so, you could have one particular image, or a song, or a video that might only be able to be heard or seen by women from a certain clan at a certain time of year. So, it can get to that really granular level of access between open and closed. And this happens for every piece of content within Mukurtu. Everything has to have a community and a protocol. There is no default. And then, finally categories. The categories are the what of Mukurtu. And so, we don't have any predefined system within Mukurtu for categorization. So, librarians and archivists close your ears, I know that hurts your head to think about, there are no controlled vocabularies in there. You, communities can, if they want use Library of Congress subject headings, but we found very early on that those don't work. That a one bucket for Indians of the Pacific Northwest does not work for the range of communities. So, how? It's very important also to turn that history again on its head. And so, within Mukurtu, you can customize these in any way. So, let me give you an example. This comes from the Plateau People's Web Portal that Guha mentioned earlier. We're in our eighth year now of the Plateau People's Web Portal. We work with the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture. And this is in the Warm Springs community in Oregon. And they choose this bag to be digitized. So, you can see we have the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture. This is their metadata that came. This is all anybody knew about this basket at the museum, obviously. And it's very sort of standard museum metadata. And the text says, "a round twine cylindrical cornhusk bag." That's great. I'm okay with that. You know, if that's as much as we have. However, after consultation with the Warm Springs community, they added their own record. So, visually, you see I just moved from one tab to the other. It's not hierarchical, it's not a comment. It's another record. And in this record, now, the Warm Springs record, we have their title. It's not a root basket, it's actually the duck basket. We have their protocol. This actually says Warm Springs Public Access. So, public is not a default. The protocol has to be added to the item. And that's very purposeful on our part. Because public is one way of sharing only. And the Warm Springs actually have about eight protocols, but I'm only showing you the public access ones obviously. And then they have their TK label, which Jane will talk about later, so I'm not going to. But then you can see here, there's a cultural narrative, and an oral history that was given by three members of the Warm Springs community. And in addition to that we have a video that they created. >> Speaker 1: Yeah, to me this looks like a legend on this bag. After you got it and see that this is there, [foreign word] for legendary. Then [foreign word] the ducks. Back in those days, you know, the people themselves argued over how the duck made its sound. And they says, no it goes like this [clucking]; the other one says, child, no it goes like this [growling]. And, a coyote was listening to them, pretty soon they separated and the people divided up because the ones that agreed this is the way the duck makes its sound and others said no its this way. So, they divided up and left, went and lived somewhere else. >> Speaker 2: My grandpa used to say that one of these days I know I'm going to go north and I'm going to hear Wasco people talking and it will be our long-lost relatives [laughter]. >> Speaker 1: See, there they are talking. >> Speaker 2: Yeah. >> Speaker 1: They're talking [laughter]. >> Speaker 2: You'll need to take a picture of that and tell a story like that [laughter]. >> Kim Christen: So, this ends up being really expanding the record. You get so much more than that root twine bag. And that's really what this is about. And I know Guha, I'm going to stop. I just wanted to say, that this is really about the relationships. This happened over eight years. Again, thank you to NEH for continued unfunded extensions of our grant. But because it is really about building these relationships. You don't walk in and sit down with elders, and they're going to tell you a story. This was over eight years. And so, the work of this, although the digital seems really fast, it's not really fast. And that's okay. It's slow. If we have ten of these, we have, well I'm not even when people ask me about; anyways, I'm going to stop now. So, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. Sorry, sorry. Okay. So. [ Applause ] >> Guha Shankar: Thank you, Kim. I think it calls into question one of the tenants of archival practice which has been a fashion lately about the more product less process methodology. And I, for one, have never been comfortable with that notion. I think what Kim and folks up here; Jane, and James, and Donald will tell you about is that the process is everything. No matter how long it takes. And that certainly holds true as Judith as pointed out for the extensive consultation which the library did over the course of its time with the Federal Cylinder Project and beyond, thanks to the vision, and the work of Alan Jabbour and other people here at the library. That ends my two-minute sermonizing for the library and on to Jane Anderson. Jane, take it away. >> Jane Anderson: Okay, thank you, Guha. Again, thank you so much for the invitation to be here. To Betsy and to Niki and congratulations to Judith. It's an amazing honor. It's a privilege to be here. What I'm going to talk about is one little piece of this larger complex that really illustrates just how much collections of indigenous material are different. And they're different, and they need a different kind of politics of care, and politics of engagement as well. So, if we think about the conditions under which a lot of this material was collected, we also have to acknowledge, as Kim mentioned from the beginning, that those conditions were uneven and unequal. The research practices that were in place at that time did not allow indigenous names to be necessarily included in catalog entries. But, the part that I'm going to focus on, which is where I come into it is around the intellectual property rights, around the copyright. The way in which copyright has historically actually functioned as a tool of exclusion that is meant that indigenous people are not the owners of this material to start with. And therefore, now in the present have very difficult challenges in terms of setting conditions for access and for circulation. So, one of the kind of encounters that we have with intellectual property law is that because researchers were the ones with the equipment and the ones who did a lot of the documentation, they became kind of accidental owners is how I term this. They didn't necessarily know that they were going to become the owners of this material, the legal rights holders just because they pressed play on the sound recordings, or that they took the photographs. That's an accidental kind of copyright ownership. And copyright is largely just interested in what the content is. It's kind of just how that body of law functions. And what adds to that complication in the present is that copyright law has very distinct forms of protection for different kinds of materials. So, for instance, photographs are protected for some period of time. Sound recording are protected for another period of time. Manuscripts are protected for another period of time. So, if you're from an indigenous community coming to deal with one person's collection, which is largely made up of sound recordings, photographs and manuscripts, you're dealing with quite complicated areas of copyright law that you have to then navigate and negotiate. So, for example, in the United States, just as kind of one example, and that really matters for kind of the issue of sound recordings that we've been discussing. Sound recordings are largely protected until 2067. So, even the earliest sound recordings, that we're going to be talking about today, from 1893, are still under protection until 2067. That is an inordinately long period of time to having to be thinking about what that protection means, to be getting permission and to be negotiating that kind of term of copyright protection period. So, the intervention that we came up with and it was largely in response to this problem of who owns the materials and what does that mean for control, and for access and circulation, was to think initially about coming up with a set of very specific licenses for indigenous material. And this just kind of came out of the Mukurtu project. It was an issue that came up for communities that were having their material returned back into Mukurtu. But we kind of struck a rather significant problem in that first iteration of developing this project around the traditional licenses. And that was that indigenous communities largely don't own that material. And if you don't own that material, you can't create a license around it. And so instead of kind of putting our efforts into developing licenses that would only serve, perhaps 10% of material that we were dealing with. We kind of took a detour and came up with another intervention, which is a social and educational intervention. It's not a legal intervention. But it is to deal with the problem that nearly 90% of the material we're dealing with is not owned by indigenous communities and yet there is still a need to deal with those problems of authorship, and ownership and circulation in a way that kind of counters these historical legacies of exclusion. And so, we came up with the Traditional Knowledge Labels Project. So, local context is the platform that we established, which is kind of, it's got two purposes. The first is kind of an educational framework, education in terms of providing information about intellectual property law, about copyright. Giving kind of people capacity to make informed decisions about when to use copyright, or when not to use copyright. What do the terms of copyright mean. There's a whole educational resources section, that we are slowly, slowly developing. And I should also say this project has just received an amazing grant from the NEH, so we're incredibly grateful for that in order to keep it moving along. And so, the first part of the local context is to provide these educational resources, to provide tutorials to help people understand. Because copyright is a complicated area of law. It's a complicated area of law for everybody, not just indigenous communities. So, we were trying to really find that way to provide those resources that can be really used usefully. But the second part of the intervention are these traditional knowledge labels. And they're probably the most exciting part of this project. At the moment, we have 13 labels that we've developed, though James we recently were working with James with Penobscot and there's another two labels that we're going to develop out of that work, which James is going to talk a little bit about, presently. But what's interesting about the labels is because they're not legal, we're allowed a little flexibility in what we can kind of label. And they really, we might want to see the labels as external protocols. So, we have labels for attribution. Attribution allow names to come back into the record. So, so much of these collections, they have not got indigenous names with them. Either the name of the community, or the name of the individuals who were actually recorded. You might find that way down in the notes. But it's not at the top when you actually are searching for that material. We have a label for different kinds of uses. So, so much about these labels is less that they're used internally, though they are used internally to help communities navigate this material within a system like Mukurtu. And you saw the TK attribution label. They're really for external users who encounter indigenous material in all kinds of context. We have an outreach label that is largely about sharing, conditions of sharing, what do those conditions look like? When we initially imagined this project, we had a sense that we, what we would create on local context was kind of a template, a guide. What could you use this label for. I mean, also at a theoretical level we were struck with a dilemma of how do you standardize something at the same time as allowing for the unique expression of community, ideals, and decision making within that label itself. And I'm going to show you and example of how that's kind of working. But this is kind of the framework that we developed. It allows you to kind of see why would you use this label, and the TK label description. And for this one, for attribution, and again, it's important that it's not authorship, it's important that it's not ownership. And we're really seeking to kind of like again, twist these ideas of what attribution and authorship and authority over cultural material is. And this labeled description reads, this label, I can't see it. So, this label is being used to correct historical mistakes or exclusions pertaining to this material. This is especially in relationship to the names of the people involved in performing or making this work and/or correctly naming the community from which it originally derives. As a user, you are being asked to also apply the correct attribution in any future use of this work. So, you can see that it's kind of a very specific intervention into the practices of citation, into the practices of excluding names in the way in which this material is circulated into the future. So, this is a community that we've been working with for several years now in British Columbia. This is the language. This material is we've been working with for several years now. This is a Scowlitz band of the Sto:lo First Nation. And they created a website that they wanted to tell their story of the history of archeology. And you can see at the top, as part of their website, they decided they wanted to use, they chose full labels from the suite of 13 that we have, that help people navigate the site and understand what Scowlitz perspectives of user engagement with their content could be. Again, it's asking people to slow down and to kind of take a different way of understanding how you engage with digital content in this kind of way in which we consume it so quickly. So, what we do with the TK labels is we create workshops that allow communities to define these labels in their own terms. And this is the definition that the Scowlitz came up with for attribution, [foreign word]. And you can see this is the; they've decided to use their language, Halkomelem, as the rerouting point to start thinking out of. And this is kind of what they wrote. This website represents the true knowledge and history of Scowlitz people. The attribution label, which really means naming place in our language. We ask everyone that visits this website to attribute our knowledge and histories to us, the Scowlitz First Nation, the tribe of Sto:lo. Our history has not always been respected or told correctly. Here, we tell our own story in our own words. We are both holders and caretakers of our own land, resources and histories. It is the responsibilities of our families and communities, as Sto:lo people to take care of these things in a respectful way. Please feel free to contact us with further questions about attribution. So, in that website which is going to be launched in October, I believe, I mean it's had so much consultation involved in it, so it's kind of slowly being assembled, but it's an amazing website, where you can really see how they've actually put these labels on their content and really asking people for a different kind of understanding of how this material could be used, and accessed and circulated on the Scowlitz terms. And that's kind of what these labels do. They reorient the terms of engagement. I'm not going to talk to you much about this, sorry, audio people. The project that we're working on with Donald is around the Jesse Fuchs' material. Again, you can tell from the way in which we're talking that Jesse Fuchs becomes the primary indicator of the author, rather than the speakers that, the Passamaquoddy speakers that were the people who actually shared this material, and shared the songs, and shared the spoken word. What we're seeking to do here is to kind of reroute the record, in particular ways, add important material back into the marked record changes. This is kind of a markup of some of the places where that change will happen. And then this is a markup of where those labels will be placed within the kind of Library of Congress catalog system. This is a markup on actually the Omaha material, but we had to kind of move through different kind of spaces to have this negotiated. But just to give you a sense of what having that label in there starts to do and what it starts to look like. We also have developing an adapter that allows communities to develop their own labels without us being present, which is really important. We don't have time to discuss that now. I'll kind of hand over to James. [ Applause ] >> Guha Shankar: Thank you, Jane. This is a very exciting development, as we all know. And perhaps during the middle of the discussion we can get Niki, and or Maggie or other people who have been working on it from the library end to comment on what it means for the library to incorporate these sorts of attributions into our own catalog record. It's a significant develop. And again, paid party political announcement, I think it's really significant that the National Library of the United States, is to undertaking this as a first step among lots of other different cultural heritage agencies. So, yeah for us. Now, Mr. James Francis. >> James Francis: Well, apparently, I don't have a slide for myself [laughter]. >> Kim Christen: I can add one in while you're talking [laughter]. >> James Francis: So, just a little bit about our community and how we kind of; who lived, give us some context about why we kind of move forward the way we do. We were a very mobile society, moving seasonally across the landscape in a very sophisticated, migratory pattern. And when fall would come and into the into the winter months, we would gather in kinship groups. So, you were with your family; matrilineal, and with your family. And it was during those winter moons when stories and oral histories were passed down. And so, what happens and when you start looking at the history of our community from our community they come down through familial lines. They come down through family lines. And so, when you fast-forward to today when you have a cultural and historic preservation department which I am the director of, it's not about us like gathering up all this information and holding all this information. Because that's outside of the cultural norm, because this information falls within family lines and it belongs to those families. But, how do we, as a department, foster and help share that information with the broader community. And so, given the Mukurtu really gave us this really safe platform to be able to set the protocols, you know, on our terms. Whether it's, you know, familiar lines; if they want to share it outside of that. But one of the things that we did when we sat down and started looking at the TK labels was to create a community voice label. And what we really are looking and excited about with Mukurtu is to take a historic photo collection that we have, and also photos of material culture and really start to elicit from the community voice about that stuff. You know, it isn't up to the Culture and Historic Preservation Department to be the be-all end-all of all information about Penobscot. We want a community voice. We want to hear from you know, my grandmother, or their grandmother, or just people living in California who are tribal members. And this digital platform allows us to do that. And to share, safely, a story that is very intimate to your family. And only share it with either your family, or with the broader Penobscot community. And so, what happens over time is these stories start to snowball. And we start to, we start to have our history unfolding before us. And so, it's a really exciting time for us. Because you know, we're starting to hear these stories that haven't been told for a long time. You know, oftentimes, we got criticized by, you know, ethnographers that there's three different versions of that same story, which one's right. Well, there's three different versions, because they probably came through three different families. And none of them are wrong. They're all correct. They all hold that core belief system. You know the beautiful thing about oral history is that it's told by an elder to a younger. And then, that younger holds that story for his whole life, before he becomes an elder and retells that. But when he does retell that, that story has his life experience woven into it. He uses examples that are relevant to his contemporaries. He uses language that are relevant to his contemporaries. So, as oral histories are passed down through time, they evolve and change with the people. That core belief is always there. You know, people ask, you know, do you still have oral stories in your community? And I always say absolutely. They may not look like you know [inaudible] and the moose stories, but that same understanding about what you need to hunt to get food for your family are passed down within, from the lines within our community. And that's the core belief of what oral stories do. And what's great about Mukurtu and the TK labels is that this has given us a digital presence, a safe digital presence. And I stress the safe because you know, in our communities we're often guarded about, you know, archives and sharing. Because so much take, take, take, take, take, take, take, take, take, take, take has been happening in our communities and it's time for us to protect ourselves and protect our stories, you know, on our terms. And Mukurtu and the TK labels are exactly that tool that's going to allow us to do that. And while meeting our community members where they're at and where we're all at these days are in front of a screen looking at digital material. So, that's all I have to say. I just wanted to thank these lovely ladies for bringing this technology to the communities. It's changing our community for the better. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Guha Shankar: Thank you, James. Parenthetically, I'll note that both Donald and James, and other native committee members will be here this week visiting the archives at the American Folklife Center. Also, our colleagues in the manuscript division here at the library. But also going out to our friends and colleagues at the National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian and the Museum of the American Indian. So, it's an honor, and a pleasure and a privilege to host these folks. And now, we come to Mr. Donald Soctomah, sir. >> Donald Soctomah: [Foreign word] Good morning to everybody. Thank you. I'm really honored to be here. I'm really honored to be engaged in this activity, because it's bringing voice back to our community. About 100 years ago, our community was 100% fluent, today in the language 10% of our population are fluent speakers in the Passamaquoddy language. But the life expectancy in our tribe is right around 50. And, so we have a problem with our fluent speakers are really dying at a fast rate. So, that makes our job more important, because we have to reach out to the community in a short amount of time. We recently had a man pass on, he was 99. And he was the leader of the language revitalization in our community. And he eventually, with help, developed the first Passamaquoddy dictionary which is online. It's an audio dictionary. But he was our link to these wax cylinders. Ninety-nine, his godfather was one of the speakers in the wax cylinders. So, we were able to, just by listening to him talk, tell us exactly what he was saying. Because in 100 years, voices change. A hundred years ago French was our second language. So, when somebody speaking Passamaquoddy they're going to have a little French accent. Well, today pretty much English has taken over everything. And the accent is a little bit different. So, if you don't know that you sort of get lost in the wax cylinder recordings. So, it's a real treasure for these to come back to the community. A hundred years ago, not only our language was declining, but our ways to go underground. I was interviewing this elder one time and she told me, she said when the lights went out at the convent, we'd go to the tribal hall and start to play the drum, and would sing the old songs. And then, they'd do that about once a week. It was safety for them to do that. And it just showed me how strong our culture is and how, you know, we have to keep pushing forward to save the culture. Because they had to do it because they'd be punished. They'd be punished for singing the old songs. They'd be punished by not getting food or being looked down upon. As I was growing up in the 1960s, there were still traditional families in our community that practiced their own way. And people from the church would call them witches. So, it was a way of looking down upon those people. But they continued to push forward and here we are, you know, those people are leaders in our culture, because they kept that cultural way. So, it goes with the wax cylinder recordings. The wax cylinder recordings, some of the songs almost disappeared in our community. The elders remembered bits and pieces of the song. They say, I remember that when I was little, you know. And then when we're able to hear these wax cylinders, they broke out in song. And we have an example here, are two examples. One of the snake song from the wax cylinder. If you haven't heard wax cylinder recordings that were recorded in the 1890s, these were the first field recordings of wax cylinders. So, yeah, lets. >> Kim Christen: Do you want me to play that? Yeah. I think it needs to go off of the folk life grand here for a minute. Okay. >> Speaker 3: Make song and description by Newel Georgia [assumed spelling] of the Passamaquoddy tribe [inaudible], March the 18th 1890. [ Speaking in Foreign Language ] >> Donald Soctomah: So, you know, this is, today this is played during our ceremonial days. The snake song is a very powerful song. A lot of the tribes across the nation and in Canada do the snake dance. And the snake is a very powerful creature. And I want you to hear. One of our singers heard the song for the first time, and thoughts of her youth, and thoughts of hearing bits and pieces of the song came back and she broke out into a song. [ Singing in Foreign Language ] You'll have to excuse my singing in the background, I didn't realize I was singing. I'll remember not to sing that. But, so what I'm doing with the wax cylinder recordings, is I'm taking them to the community, we're having group listening sessions. And some of our younger singers that can't speak the language, but they understand music, they're taking the beat. The beat is really important. And then, they're learning the language to fill that in. And it's making the complete circle like I spoke to before about the circle, how it comes around it comes back to the community. Now, we have our ancestors from 1890 speaking to us. You know that's really powerful, really powerful. And you wouldn't believe, but some of the people, you know, the older people break down and cry when they hear the songs of their great-great-grandfather, or the stories that they heard bits and pieces of before. So, the labels are going to be powerful on this too because some of these songs are only meant for certain ceremonies. Some are only meant for men. Some are only meant for women. And then the stories; some of the stories, what I'm afraid of is somebody might hear the story and write a book about it. And then they claim ownership of the story. You know, that's happened before. One of our neighboring tribes the Maliseet, there was a researcher in their community back in the thirties and he wrote down stories. He spent two years in the community gathering stories. And he promised the community that the stories were theirs. Well, he passed on, his children ended up having the book published. And now the Maliseets are told you don't own these stories. You know, that's not right. So, I'm glad I have the opportunity to come here, to talk about it. To work with Guha, the Library of Congress. And it's really going to bring back some of the songs, some of the stories to our community. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Guha Shankar: Thank you, Donald. Thanks to all the panel. I just wanted to make note that that particular session was filmed at a community consultation visit that Jane and Kim very kindly invited me along to in March, was it March? Something like that, which was actually quite I don't know March or something like that. March or April. So, we were not but about 100 yards away from where Jesse Walter Fuchs recorded Little Joseph and Peter Selmore [assumed spelling], the two men you hear on the recordings of the Passamaquoddy. I thought that was a pretty special moment. I'm going to open up for questions. I think I see some nodding heads and some other people. Obviously, some of the people we'd like to hear form and also again acknowledge the support of the federal government for this particular set of projects between Kim and Jane, which have a very direct benefit to the community. Our colleagues from NEH and IMLS. So, thanks again for making the feds look good in this day and age. But, do we have, we have people standing by with microphones, and I'm happy to jump in with questions. But, please there's two questions right to your right. [ Speaking in Foreign Language ] >> Speaker 4: I want to acknowledge our visitors from Penobscot and Passamaquoddy. I'm working with Latin American indigenous communities, media production. Mostly analog right now. And in the TK label project I noticed there's a button that says translate. So, how do we make these best practices conveyable to other communities? >> Jane Anderson: Yeah, that's a great question Malia, thanks for coming as well. So, we're in the process of actually translating them. A colleague of yours Maria Montenegro [assumed spelling], who you know, who's been involved in the translation of these labels. Because we have acknowledged from the very beginning that there needs that translation capacity because there are large amount of communities who would like to use these labels. So, Spanish is our first language that we're doing translation into. Given the enormous amounts of material that are also held in institutions and in other context. So, I mean in many ways this is a very, very new project. It's only four years old and the work that we're trying to do is you know, is emergent in many ways, in the sense that we respond largely to communities that we get contacted by and then we kind of build different kinds of components that support those communities. We've just been contacted by, and why did do that Spanish translation for a community in Chile who is thinking about starting to use the labels. And so, we're kind of working closely in relationship with that. Don't necessarily know what that's going to look like yet, but it's kind of the direction that the labels, they tend to have their own life, which is very interesting in how they get adapted, and adopted and re-appropriated within each context is very different. And we're kind of like slowly amassing examples of what that looks like. Because they're really largely in the testing phase. And we're still in the testing phase of what this is and what this can be. What's very clear for us, is how they do work for communities in the sense that they allow communities to express their own cultural protocols in their own terms and also in their own languages as needed. And also, on the flipside for institutions, they give institutions a mechanism to start dealing with these colonial legacies that many institutions know that they have in their collection, but there is no real device to get at that. And so, having these labels really functions as a means to bringing institutions and communities together in a different kind of engaged relationship. But also changing these historical practices that have been uneven. They allow communities to be at the decision-making table in a different kind of way. And that's what we're really trying to change as a practice. >> Kim Christen: And on a technical side with the NEH grant that we have right now, that we just started, so it will be another few years, but we do have a beta version of the adapter/generator, which will allow. Because right now Jane and I go around and then we do custom versions and that model obviously isn't sustainable for a whole bunch of reasons. But, we do also know that communities always ask us, well who else is using this and what have they done. So, part of the local context website will have examples of communities who want to share the labels that they've created. Because that's always a powerful way to get communities started. But what adapter/generator will do will be allow communities to translate and transcribe and adapt the labels in any way they see fit. And so that will, you know, we have a demo version of it, and in another year and a half or so, we'll have the final version. >> Speaker 5: All right, can you hear me? Thank you for the presentation, it was really interesting to hear from all of you and such a range of experiences. In the examples that I have heard over the past few years form the TK labels and Mukurtu, it's all been examples from the US and Canada. And so, my question is actually similar to yours. Are there examples of communities where you're taking this further south in the hemisphere? My work here is mostly doing research on indigenous groups in Central America and so I see that need daily. And just interested in what's happening. >> Jane Anderson: Yeah, in one project that we've been engaged with recently is with Oxford University. And they are working in Bolivia. It's an ornithology collection and they're trying to create a database that tells stories about birds from kind of all these different contexts. And Bolivia is one of the sites that they've actually been working in for a very long time. And they have started to incorporate the labels into their kind of digital databases as well. Just again, giving this kind of expression of when should this material be shared, when is it actually for particular families, what's at stake in those sharing processes and the labels allow that kind of conversation. >> Kim Christen: No, there are a couple examples from archaeological collaborations through the Center for Digital Archaeology who hosts Mukurtu sites and have done, they have a couple bilingual sites. But, as Jane said, so far, I mean it's about, you know, communities who have come to us. So, you know, although Mukurtu is you know a free and open source, and people can download it. So, in some senses we don't know exactly how many. In other senses the biggest communities so far that we've been working with are Canada, Australia and New Zealand. We have quite a few Maori communities who've in the last year taken it up with quite a lot of vigor. And so, you will see various translations on those sites. >> Guha Shankar: Let me, actually extend that question toward James and Donald. I know it's early days for your projects with Mukurtu and TK labels. But does this work in a bilingual context for you, or do you want it to work in that particular way? Either one start. >> James Francis: Well, we have just digitized our entire Penobscot dictionary. Had the speakers say each and every word. And one thing, in our previous training, with Michael, who works with Kim, was a kind of a plug-in from Mukurtu that had to do with, for a dictionary. And so, although we have an online database with all the words and those are spoken. We really want to start to look at the language differently in these kind of what we call cultural clusters. You know, I had an elder once tell me to truly understand the culture, you must understand the language. And to understand the language you have to understand the culture. And it always seemed this kind of catch 22 paradoxical thing where, you know, which way do I go. But, you know I think that as a way that Dr. Siebert [assumed spelling] set up the dictionary, was he alphabetized everything by Penobscot word, which was in an alphabet that he created. And he failed to. Kind of decode the words. So, if there's a word for salmon, it just says, Atlantic salmon. You know, so here's the Penobscot word for Atlantic salmon, then in English is just says Atlantic salmon. And a lot of times for nouns, that's all you get. And there's no translation really. I mean we know it's a salmon. So, you have to look at the words that are adjacent to it in the dictionary and you find things like it ricochets off the water. So, there's this action that's happening that's related to how my ancestors saw the salmon. So, these kind of cultural clusters are really important and I've been thinking about how we can use the platform on Mukurtu to kind of start that work of decoding some of that. Because you know there's a lot of healing that has to happen in our community. We don't have the luxury of having 10% of our population be speakers. As the Passamaquoddy's do. We're in you know dire straits as far as that's concerned. So, there's a lot of healing that has to happen in our community around language loss. And so, language is really kind of held closely to those language keepers. And really want to share it within the community. And so, Mukurtu is you know, really seen as a platform that's going to allow us to share it with only those who we want to share it with. >> Jane Anderson: I think translation is just a really interesting question within the project in and of itself. Particularly, when you saw the Scowlitz translation of attribution, which was name and place. When we were recently working with you, the translation of attribution was this is the correct way with what Penobscot is kind of putting out as what attribution means from a Penobscot standpoint. So, that's kind of interesting translation components that happen at that interface as well. Because attribution doesn't necessarily have a direct translation. It's kind of what the community thinks about when they're thinking about how do they want to present this within a label for an institution. And it's like, well this is the right way of doing that, which is kind of again coming out of the standpoint of the language, of the Penobscot language, not out of the standpoint of the English language, so it's interesting. >> Guha Shankar: Donald can I ask you to take that question on as well? >> Donald Soctomah: We're just at the starting stages of the concept of Mukurtu, and it's going to take a lot of work in our community to get, to move to the next step. But we're going to do anything we can to preserve. If there's a unique way like this to preserve the language, to preserve culture, we're going to do it. >> Kim Christen: Actually, the language was one of the first. It's always been important for Mukurtu. All the features and functions of Mukurtu came from communities who wanted them, starting with the Warumungu community. And we have a community development software way that we scope out things. So, communities ask us for things. And a dictionary's been something that communities have asked for for the last six years. And James saw a sneak peek and I'm happy to say that the dictionary will actually be a baked in feature in 2.06 October 10, so you heard it here. It will be October 10. The reason it takes so long, is that, I mean part of it, yes is technical, and part of it, yes, is money. I'm not saying that. But part of it is imagining what a dictionary means. Some of these are, it's a very sort of western and colonial this listing, and we've had to think, how can we make something flexible enough for Penobscot, for [inaudible] all these communities who we're working with, so we took a lot of input and we had to make it as flexible as possible while also making sure that it upholds the, you know, sort of cores, the heart and soul of Mukurtu. So, every word can have a protocol on it. This is important. And this came out of my first work in aboriginal communities in Australia. That's central. It's like the words themselves, they're not open and out there. And so, there are many things that couldn't be heard by other people and so ways to do that and also to make it this sort of rounded experience, with audio, with video, for learning, for all these different things. So, it is something. Language is, you know, is sort of the foundation of many of these things. And it was great, the workshop we were at, Jane was talking about with Scowlitz, about translating the labels. When they translated the sacred label and translated these others, just those conversations around I think on the local context platform when communities, you know, start sharing these, it will I think be a powerful you know, just set of examples of turning that language around itself. >> Guha Shankar: Thank you. Jessie? >> Jessie: Yeah, good morning. Thank you so much. This is a wonderful panel and I guess on behalf of my NEH colleagues and other funders, it's always wonderful to hear about the work that we supported. But mostly congratulations for such powerful impacts. But, speaking from a personal capacity. Kim, you made a powerful statement I think, that the history of collecting is a history of colonialism. And I think that's something that in cultural heritage and in professional practice at least, we often cover up with standards and best practices. And so, it's very powerful to see the way that this work is impacting communities. And it's such a powerful way to illustrate that with seeing examples from collections in the way that you've reached source communities. Picking up on the previous question, I'm wondering though, what the uptake is among institutions here. It's great to hear that the library is integrating them, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. And I think particularly because hearing this sort of example where we can see the actual impacts of you know, on communities the way that we relate to these collections. And just to pick one example, you know the Society of American Archivists has kind of you know front relationship with the protocols for Native American materials. And there's many more. So, I'd be interested just to know how this work is impacting those professional practices that I think we often like to forget about these histories. >> Kim Christen: There's a whole bunch of threads in your question, Jessie, thank you. And thank you. And thank you to the NEH. So, I was going to sort of go on a rant there at the end about standards, about user, you know about impact and these, because I get asked. And I'm fine because I know the impulses. Well how many, well how many. And I get that. I do understand. But that's only one way to measure impact. And you know, I get emails from people. How many people are using Mukurtu, or how many people are using portal, or what's your data on the portal. It's like I could go look at the analytics for the portal, and I actually just like, really just didn't answer, I just blew someone off there, because I got tired of them asking, because I don't want to answer how many pieces of content are in the portal after eight years. How many this, because it doesn't matter. The relationships matter. And I have to say that NEH and IMLS are supportive of understanding differential types of impact and community impact. So, thank you to funders. But that has changed. The first two proposals in 2006/2007and I kept the reviewer's comments for the portal, were very, very hostile somewhat, to the notion of, Joel can attest to this. To the notions of everything not being open. I mean, you know, that this type of access, and how can they have this. I mean it was really, there was very telling to whoever the reviewers were, that we don't know. But having said, you know all that, we know that there are users of Mukurtu worldwide. So, we know there's in Australia, and New Zealand, and Canada, and the United States. We know the numbers of workshops that we do every year for those. And we can see that the biggest change has been the nonnative repositories now coming to us. That's the biggest change in the last two or three years is that. You know, and Guha, and Betsy and Niki have been a charge. They saw the Plateau People's Web Portal 2008 and hat's off to them to think how can we do something like this, what can we do something like this. Now it did take eight years to get something like the labels in here. So, it is that slow process. And we also have to remember that standards are set from a certain perspective. And they're the standards of you know a certain type of professional, professionalism that discounts what we're talking about here in terms of oral histories that change. And these aren't, you know, the metadata doesn't stick and stay the same because it's fuzzy, or it's you know dynamic, or those sorts of things, so. Does that kind of answer you? >> Jane Anderson: I'm going to. >> Kim Christen: Are you going to? >> Jane Anderson: I'm going to follow up. >> Kim Christen: Okay. >> Jane Anderson: I mean it's interesting to see where desire around using this kind of material, like these devices comes from. And you know, so what can Penobscot, Penobscot have collections in over 30 institutions in the United States. And so, slowly with the project that James has been developing for the Penobscot collections project, that is going to have the implications that those institutions that have Penobscot material are going to start using the Penobscot labels. So, that just kind of, that moves from one direction. Already, for Penobscot, the Abbe Museum and the University of Maine wanting to use the labels. Because they again, I mean it what's really interesting is it takes people within institutions to recognize the problems that they have with their collections. And that's always going to be the first starting point. And so, it's always going to be those relationships to start with. Those relationships that acknowledge that the histories of these collections is problematic and has all of these kind of components that have legacies that deeply carry themselves into the present, and into any kind of sharing futures that you might want to have. If you have an ethical commitment to understanding that communities need to be engaged in that process form the very beginning. You know, then we have institutions like the Field Museum, which you know, they have very, very complicated collections. And they kind of come to us and say, well who could we partner with in order to test these labels in our institution? And I'd have to say, in every instance that we're working with an institution, it's testing to what extent this is possible. Because so much invisible labor happens at an institutional level too in order to build the capacity for the institution to take on these questions. And then to actually develop different practices and to implement. And so that just takes time. So, the project we've been working on, this is like in its already third year, nearly fourth year around the Ancestral Voices Project. So, you know that's just kind of like getting to this stage. So, there's still so much to be done. But it's a kind of slow burn, but then sometimes it kind of picks up and goes really fast. >> Guha Shankar: I guess frankly, I would say, I mean just as you want to question the notion of you know more product, less process in this particular instance, we also want to question the notion of scaling. And when I hear the word scaling, it's always scaling up. Why not just scale? You know, why not just human scale at the level where people can actually interact with the material. So, there are 31 cylinders, or recordings that the Passamaquoddy have. There's a dictionary of Father [inaudible] in the National Anthropological Archive, that's yet another piece of this puzzle of what language revitalization language reclamation might take. American Philosophical Society has certain materials. So, all of these have to be approached, not by us at the Library of Congress, and not by somebody out there; Jane, or you know Kim can't necessarily make those kinds of, they can make some interventions, but at the end of the day, it's up to people like Donald and James to make those decisions which are going to affect them on a daily basis. So, I think the question that people might have about how many, is really out of place. It's not up to us to determine how many. I mean it's up to the Passamaquoddy to say we have just enough for our own needs, or for our own purposes. So, that's something we might also wish to consider at a certain level. As a matter of fact, I think we're excited because in ways that we would not be able to do, Mukurtu, and Passamaquoddy and Penobscot are actually doing the aggregation work of all of these different institutions and bringing collections together in ways that we never could. We know they're out there, but we're not going to be able to build that platform or that portal to do that intellectual work of gathering those things in one place. That really is I think a fundamental shift, I mean it's 180 degrees away from the way in which we think about curating it. Because that's the point about all of this is the community co-curation is at the heart of this very venture, and it goes back to what, you know Carl was saying and Alan was saying about the way in which American Folklife Center approached the Federal Cylinder Project in the 1980s. It came at that moment of sharing and a co-responsibility among and between communities and the federal agencies. So, yeah. Sorry, and a question. Yes, Chris. >> Chris: Hi, my name is Chris from the Brooklyn Arts Council and I just wanted to address how Mukurtu has impacted the work we've been doing in New York State. I've been working on a project for the past three years to address how folklorists throughout New York State, and there's about 30 of us, organizations that receive funding from the New York State Council on the Arts folk arts program, how we share our information and we are building a portal built on Mukurtu. That does so much for us. It not only allows us to place our materials online, which we have a lot of pressure to do in the public sector. But it brings the communities into the process, which has just been so incredible. In addition, what I found is that the idea of sharing in a proper way, we've been contacted by very, very small organizations. One in particular in Osceola, New York. They have an old-time fiddler's Hall of Fame and they heard about the way we're doing this. And they don't even have internet, and there they are. But they have a wonderful collection. But they're excited about the fact that Mukurtu provides a platform to share in a proper way to allow those cultural protocols. So, I just wanted to say thanks, but also give an example of how we're implementing, or Mukurtu is being used in a different sort of environment, and allowing public sector folklorists to bring communities back in to the collections that many of us have large collections, so thanks. >> Kim Christen: Yeah, and I was contacted by an archivist who is working with a transgender, this is the great thing. I've been doing this for nine years. And you know it started off, you know it was a very personal project with the community in Australia that I was working with and it's grown into this thing. And now, we're starting to see it move beyond indigenous communities, just you know it's transgender archives. So, there's things in here that would be, you know, potentially put people at risk. So, we want to use Mukurtu as the platform to share these oral histories around this transgender archive. It's because it's that same set of, it's going to be safe for them to do that. So, I think there's you know these other multiple instances of its use. So, it's great to hear your use, Chris, thank you. >> Guha Shankar: Thank you for that, because that just reminds me of what Andrea Kitta and folks in various roles and others were saying yesterday about the notion of access and discoverability of individuals whose you know work is, and it places them at certain kinds of risk. And this is yet another interesting residence, which I thank my colleagues for having brought all these folks together. Because I'm just really interested in the crosstalk that's been happening here. Yes, please. Cliff. >> Cliff: Hi, I'm curious, James and Donald, if you had to get tribal government buy-in into doing this kind of work and collaborating with these folks over here. And if so, how did you kind of successfully make that case. How did you kind of bring people in, you know within your communities into this cause. You know, I'm sure you must have proper channels that you have to go through for this sort of thing. >> James Francis: Yeah, a couple of things. First of all, we have a rights protection board that was formed in the last five years. It was a re-formation of some older research review boards that really try to protect Penobscot culture. So, the tribal council had approved the formation of this board, which has some subcommittees under that and one of them is intellectual property rights committee. That kind of looks at, you know what is Penobscot, what do we feel is important to protect. And so, it was that committee who really made the decision to work with Jane on this grant to move forward with the Mukurtu. So, you know, there are some kind of channels of, you know it's just not me saying, you know let's move forward. You know, it's a group of people who feel work like this is important in the community. And again, you know, we're using the platform not for us to have a voice, but for the community to have a voice. So, you know, it's; and that's ultimately the most important piece for us. >> Donald Soctomah: For us what we did when we formed our historic preservation office, the tribe sort of, our mission was to do this. And the tribe is busy with business, with community issues for the preservation issues, that's our assignment. So, I usually consult with elders in our community. And I have a small group of elders that point the direction to go. And anything that has to be signed, like any type of agreement goes back to council. But I have to develop and work with organizations to develop any type of agreement. >> Guha Shankar: And I think that's also another way of talking about scale in these particular kinds of projects. We're, the anti-DPLA, that's the case. You know, we're not working at this like mass scale, we're working at individual. >> Kim Christen: We're not anti, we're not against. >> Guha Shankar: Anti, the non-DPLA. Sorry, semantics will trip us up every time. >> Kim Christen: They're recording this. >> Guha Shankar: Yeah, of course they are. Hi. Hello, DPLA. The point being that again, each of these is a case, I mean it's a case by case basis, right? It's not mass digitization just for the sake of mass digitization. Were it the case that would be great. But every individual community has cultural protocols, which are internally vetted and then passed out to us. Right? It's not something, again, as very carefully the way that Jane, and Kim, and Donald, and James have talked about this, it's all the negotiated moment. And we're privileged and proud to be part of that negotiation. >> Kim Christen: And I would say from our end we get, you know, coming through out support desk on our site every day, 90% comes from cultural preservation offices, archivists, librarians. It's not their IT department making the decision what content management system they should use, because yes, it is a content system, but, you know, but it's not. It's not like making a choice to use content DM that the IT people get together and make. And so, we get down the line, we get their ID departments involved. But it's rare. It has happened. But it's rare that we get contacted by you know, an IT department or something with those more sort of standards based questions. And it's really word of mouth. And that's, you know and it has really sort of taken off in the last few years. But that really is how it's been for us. >> Guha Shankar: Any other hands out there? Yes, Mary? >> Mary: Hi there. I guess this question is for Jane, but others can comment on it. What are the training needs for people in institutions for this kind of work to take place? >> Jane Anderson: It's a very good question, Mary. I mean the kind of the first training needs are around recognizing those histories of collections. So, it's an educational training need on just kind of one level. And then, I mean I think the Library of Congress kind of proof of concept has been a really good example for thinking about what the different kinds of training needs are in terms of thinking about implementation. What does it take to work with the community? What kind of time period needs to exist? Also, what are the questions of copyright that arise in each kind of collection. Understanding what those questions are about are also a training need. Partly, because it's not necessarily clear or people haven't necessarily been thinking about what those copy right questions are that either allow the circulation of material, or actually close down the circulation of material. So, that's kind of at least one point. There's also training needs around recognizing how to work with communities. And that's a time-based project and a relationship based project. And its things don't happen instantly. So, there's kind of a sense of what kind of temporal limits of a project need to also be in place. Training, in terms of implementing the labels, it's not that difficult at all, but there has to be the conversations between different sections of the institutions so that they're in conversation with each other in order to make that happen as well. And actually, maybe Niki, you could actually state a little bit to that, I think that would be great. If you wouldn't mind. >> Kim Christen: Yeah, that actual technical implementation. >> Niki: Hi. Speak to which element in particular? Because there are several. >> Kim Christen: I think the technical; well, the sort of meta technical implementation, all those meetings we had, like where it would go in your content management system, because it's indigenous to Mukurtu. If you get Mukurtu you get the TK labels. It's like a two for one. But if you have a different content management system. >> Niki: Right, so there were, yeah, there was lots of discussion about how big will the label be, where will it display and all of those are still open questions. So, nothing's been finalized. But yeah, I mean we have certain technical limitations like anybody else with the system that you know if you put something in this field, it's going to display at the bottom, you know, because that's what we do with all the other zillions of records we have in our catalog. So, yeah, we're talking about how to work that out. I think your question about training is really good. I think one of the, I want to just add that one of my initial concerns, and I was getting it from others was, well, you know, how are you going to navigate this once they're on to the next project and you're stuck, you know figuring out how to dispute issues around takedown or changing labels. And, you know, you made the point, Jane, that we're frontloading this, right? Like we're doing all this engagement upfront so that theoretically, you know, this has been really worked out. And so, that was a real turning point for me with this, where I got my head, you know, around it more. >> Guha Shankar: And I guess the training, just in a particular example from the Library of Congress, is that those are conversations that's being had not just between Niki, and Jane, and Kim, and the community, and myself in going out, you know, on site visits. But also, Maggie Kruesi, who is on the cataloging staff here, but also our project 1 team, which is our, which provides the access point for all of our public facing portals. So, that's a lot of moving, and also general council who's talking precisely about rights issues. And so, the training, then is not; I'm not sure training is perhaps the right word for it. But you better be trained to be having a lot of conversations among and between your people at the institutional level. So, that's something which, it doesn't force you to talk to each other, but it just makes conversation and the project outcome a lot smoother if you have people who are talking to each other and not in these legendary silos which we always hear about within institutions. And sorry, Niki? >> Niki: Well, I mean to the library's credit we took this to the powers that be, who govern the web and they were very receptive. I mean there was lots of talk about we want to keep it a pilot, and we want to you know, put certain boundaries around it. But they were hip to the need. And they knew we needed to do something. And so, kudos to us in that regard. >> Kim Christen: But I think to Mary's one of the things for Mary's question is on the local context site and with the grant from NEH one of the things we are going to do is have those sort of frequently asked questions. And we have this on our Mukurtu site because we have had enough questions. What does your IT department need to know? What does your tribal council need to know? What does your archivist need to know? So, we have all of this. And so, we have, and I think we'll do the same thing on the local context site, now that we're seeing. And the Library of Congress, this project is actually a really good one for us to be doing to figuring this all out, because the scale of the federal government. It's like if we can navigate this, you know, hopefully we can navigate other things, right? I think we've had meetings with everybody. Yeah, so we're aces. So, I just think. But because we do. You know, we are thinking, not necessarily about scale in terms of number, but we're thinking about sustainability in terms of how do we get the information out to the people who need it, if we can't always go. And we love to do these workshops. This moment with Gracie when she started singing the song. I mean it was like, that was it we're done. At the time it was like if nothing else happens with this project, honestly, if no label gets put on, if we don't; if they never have Mukurtu, if nothing, like being there in that moment was so amazing, it's what it's all about, that you know, that's what we mean in terms of sustainability. So, you know, I don't want to blow off Jessie's question or think that it was, you know it is a factor, but let's think about, you know, sustainability, human interaction, relationships for the long term. Because if we do, if we are starting from you know the history of collection is the history of colonialism, then we have a lot to repair. So, we start with the relationships and that's why I'm really glad that Donald, and James, and that we could all be here. You know, because it is all of us working together. None of these parts work separately. >> Guha Shankar: Our able timekeeper has given us the time sign. But I would like to leave it to our guests form Penobscot and from Passamaquoddy to take a moment to say what their final say might be, if you have such a thing to say. Unless you just want to get to the coffee. >> >> James Francis: All I have to say is [foreign word]. So, we have no word in the Penobscot language for good-bye, it means I will see you again. Thank you. >> Donald Soctomah: And I just like to thank again all the powers to be that gave us the opportunity. You know, we live in this remote corner of the country. And being remote sort of saved our language. But now, being remote is sort of hard to try to get this material back. So, I want to thank whoever put this together, you know, for helping us because this is going to bring the energy back into our community that's really needed right at this time. And thanks for the shot of energy yeah. >> Guha Shankar: Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Stephen Winick: Well, we've reached the final collection feature here at the symposium. So, we want to talk now about one of our most important projects and most important collections, which is the Veterans History Project. It's been going on now for over 10 years and has collected over 100,000 collections from American veterans. Like the American Folklife Center, it was established by legislation of the Congress. And so, it's one of those programs that that the Congress has decided is an important priority for us to be collecting the oral histories of American veterans. And so, we're lucky to have with us a senior reference specialist from the Veterans History Project, named Megan Harris. And I should tell you that there's this great magazine out there, we haven't mentioned this yet, but one of the things on the table out there is a magazine, "The Library of Congress Magazine," which featured AFC as its main kind of theme. So, that's why we selected this issue. It's not the most recent issue, but it's the issue that deals with AFC. So, please pick this up on your way out and when you do, you'll find that Megan is a celebrity. Because she's featured as the "My Job Feature" in a "Library Congress Magazine." So, she can tell you about her job, but also about the Veterans History Project in general and what that great project is up to. So, without further ado, Megan Harris. [ Applause ] >> Megan Harris: Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for attending today. So, my plan for the next 10 to 15 minutes or so is to give you a little bit of a brief overview of the Veterans History Project. And then, also talk specifically about the reference and research end of things. Because that's my little sphere of influence or piece of the pie so-to-speak. And then, also talk about a few of our recent acquisitions that have come in, in the last year or so. Some of the most really intriguing and interesting things that we've had come through the door. It's a little strange not to have a monitor in front of me here. So, if I screw up with the slides; oh, perfect, all right, great. Thank you. So, I'm not sure how familiar folks are with the Veterans History Project, but just to give you a brief overview. We were created by Congress in 2000 to collect, preserve, and make accessible the stories of America's war veterans. And in the yeah, in the 15 years since we've been around, we've collected material relating to over 100,000 different veterans. In addition to oral histories, we also collect other items that help to tell a veteran's story. Things like original letters, diaries, journals, photographs, memoires, military papers, two-dimensional pieces of artwork. Essentially, everything, but three-dimensional artifacts that would explain a veteran's experience and their story. And we organize material under each individual veteran's name. So, when I speak of a collection, that might refer to a single oral history, or it might refer to an oral history, and five original photographs, or 50 letters, or a 200-page memoir, or even something like 500 or 1000 letters. So, our collections really vary in terms of size, but all of them relate back to that individual veteran's story. So, in terms of how this material comes to be here, we essentially asked the general public to become Folklife practitioners. And to go out into their community, or maybe just out into their own family and interview the veteran in their life. And the project is really setup with the idea that anyone can participate in the project. That you don't have to have any sort of background in oral history interviewing, or folklife, or journalism, or interviewing. That anyone can take part and sit down with a veteran and our field kit, and go through the process of either conducting an interview, or documenting that veteran's story in another way. And then submit it here to the library to be archived. We provide veterans and interviewers with a field kit that has a list of suggested questions, and all of the paperwork. All of the release forms that they would need to participate. And so, using that field kit, and then drawing on the expertise of our staff if they need to. They simply conduct the interview, and send it in here to Veterans History Project to be archived. We have collections that are donated by individuals, folks who just maybe only went and interviewed their relative, or their next-door neighbor, or their postman. But we also have collections that are done on a much wider scope by different organizations such as the VFW, and the VA, the Red Cross, libraries, colleges, and universities, Boy Scout, Eagle Scout troops and those sorts of organizations. So, individual participation and then group participation as well. So, the goal of our project is really to document the experience of war. And we take a very folklife oriented take on that. We consider ourselves a social or cultural history project and not a straight military history project. And our collections really bear this out, bear out the focus that we have and the approach that we have. So, in addition to providing information and testimony about more military focused aspects, things like battles and campaigns, and unit movements, conflicts. Our collections also have a lot to do with things like military traditions and folklore. One of the pictures I included here was of a crossing the line ceremony, which is a naval tradition, that involves costumes and role-playing, and it's a fantastic military tradition that a lot of our naval collections discuss. I included another picture here, it's a little hard to see of a veteran eating some canned peaches that were in ration. And food ways are a really interesting part of our collection. Looking at how collections; how veterans in their collections talk about the experience of food and eating in the military. And we also have collections that include original artwork, the ways in which veterans made sense of their experience and described it in original artwork. Drawings, and photographs, and paintings, and that kind of thing. So, our collections have this focus and bear out this social cultural bend that we have and really explore things that you might not expect to find in military oral history collections. So, because of our broad collecting scope, the research use of our collections is similarly broad. We have researchers who use our collections in some of the very typical ways that you might expect. Things like documentaries that had to do with say, the USS Indianapolis, or Pearl Harbor, or Battle of the Bulge, D-day, some of those more traditional scopes. But then we also have researchers who use or collections in very surprising and unexpected ways. Folks who have investigated, using our collections, the history of martial arts, in the United States, looking at how boxing in World War II really impacted the development of martial arts after the war. Or the history of mah-jongg. Or one recent inquiry had to do with World War I and how troops were entertained during the war. Both the entertainment that the military provided to them and then how they make their own entertainment. So, a really wide variety of different research uses. And our researchers come from all over, and all different walks of life. Students and teachers, documentarians, folks from other agencies such as the Department of Defense and the National Park Service, have all used our collections in various different ways. And they've also then used them in different things like museum exhibits, print media, educational resources. There's currently, on display, down at the Atlanta Airport actually is a huge display honoring veterans that drew about 100 different photographs of veterans from our collections. Really interesting use of VHP collections. So, if you happen to be travelling through Atlanta you can check out the VHP images as part of that display. So, lots of varied uses of our collections. And ways that they pop up around. All right. So, in terms of recent acquisitions, we get about 100 different collections a week. Roughly about 4-500 collections a month. All of them are interesting, but there have been a few that have come through the door that give you a sense of some of the initiatives that we've been working on. But also, things that just pop through, unexpected acquisitions that have come through our door. One initiative that I have been involved in is with a professor out in Monterey Bay, California. She's a professor at California State University, Monterey Bay, and she, along with her students has been documenting the history of a decommissioned military base called Fort Ord, which was a real center for military personnel up through the 1990s, when it was decommissioned. And she has long been documenting the history of Fort Ord. So, we partnered with her recently, not only to interview veterans of the surrounding area, but specifically, one of our processing technicians, Timmy Kabran [assumed spelling] and I went out to Monterey Bay to take part in something called a stand down, which was put on by a local veterans transition center. And they essentially brought homeless veterans from the surrounding area to Fort Ord and provided them social services for a weekend. We went out there to help facilitate, not only interviewing veterans, homeless veterans who were being provided services, but also some of the volunteers who were supporting the efforts. And that garnered around 40 different oral histories. Not only of the homeless veterans, but also of the volunteers. And it was a really wonderful example of something out of the ordinary that also speaks to and helps document the stories of a very underserved, under documented population demographic which is homeless veterans. So, it's a really unique set of collections that came out of that initiative. We had a couple of different diary collections come through the door recently. One came through last December and it involves a diary that was given to us by the family of Glenn Piercy, who might be a familiar name to you. He has a wonderful civil rights era photograph collection that's part of the American Folklife Center along with his brothers, Glenn Piercy provided us with a diary relating to his uncle, who was a POW in the Pacific theater during World War II and unfortunately, did not make it home. So, along with this original diary, he gave us letters and photographs, you know, just a tremendous collection relating to his uncle. He made this collection, we were kind of blown away by it, and ended up writing a blog post about it. And then about six weeks after we were contacted by the family of a friend of his who he had served with. Who volunteered that their family also had an original diary. So, we now have two of these very unique, very rare, original Pacific POW diaries. They're the only two diaries of their kind in our collections. And they're interconnected. They speak to of another. Because they come from two veterans who were buddies. One of whom made it home and one of whom did not. So, that was a really amazing, both of those acquisitions were really interesting, really wonderful acquisitions. We also have seen a real uptick in World War I collections coming through out door. You might think that with the demise of the actual World War I generation of soldiers who served in the war, that we wouldn't see any more of those collections, but in fact, we've seen a definite steady uptick in our World War I collections coming through the door. Mainly things like correspondence collections, and photograph collections. Including one really notable collection that came from someone who served with a well-known unit called the Lost Battalion. Well-known, infamous for the losses that they incurred during one particular battle. And this, you probably can't tell at all from the PowerPoint, but the diary is quite lyrical. Beautiful prose describing the veteran's experiences training and then in combat. But it's most notable because it's written in teeny, teeny, tiny script. And it's essentially illegible at this point. It's almost as if the veteran had written it using a magnifying glass, even though I don't think that was the case. And it's just tremendous. And it was also transcribed in the 1930s. So, we have a full transcript of it, in addition to having the original, which was donated by the veteran's grandson. So, that has been one of our most notable World War I collections. We've had a lot of researchers come through recently looking at our World War I material. And a lot of it will be incorporated into the library's World War I exhibition next year. So, that's sort of a very brief, very quick me talking really fast about the Veterans History Project. But I'm glad to answer any questions if we have any time? No? No, questions. No time. All right. Feel free to email me, I'm glad to answer any questions you might have about VHP and our collections, scope, using the collections for your own research or anything to do with that. So, thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> Stephen Winick: So, once again that was Megan Harris from the Veterans History Project and I should mention a couple of things that she mentioned in her talk, including our blog, "Folklife Today." So, we haven't talked about that yet, but it's a great way to find out what's going on at AFC and VHP, it's a shared blog between those two parts of the library. So, you know, we have blog posts about general folklife issues, but also a lot of blog posts about the Veterans History Collections, including great pieces written by Megan, she's one of our favorite bloggers. So, I'm the general editor of that blog and you can just find it, the easiest way to find it actually is on the table outside, there are bookmarks for the Folklife Center, one of which specifically says Folklife Today on it. So, look for that one ad you'll find all the information on there. So, now we're going to continue and wrap up the whole symposium. Because we have with us a great speaker, and as a great thinker, a great brain who has been part of the Folklife Center for a long time. So, Tom Rankin has been associated with the Folklife Center in various ways, including as a field worker, in our field projects. But most recently, as a member of our Board of Trustees and as a chair of our Board of Trustees for some years. Tom has also been the director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and associated with that center for a long time. And also, he's a terrific documentary photographer himself. But mainly we love him for his great brain, that tying up all the issues that we have in our symposia. And he's going to come up here and give us some wonderful closing remarks. So, please welcome Tom Rankin. [ Applause ] >> Tom Rankin: Well, subtract the hyperbole there and I could, you know, I if I was a 21st century guy with this crowd sources, this wrap up. But, I'm more of a dust to digital guy, an all deference to Lance. So, I've been sitting for the last day and a half taking, I feel like I'm back in graduate school. You know, I couldn't not pay attention, because I'm supposed to wrap up, right? Which is a good exercise. And I'm not sure I can do justice to what's come before, or to Steve's notion that I'm a good thinker, but I'm going to try to say a few things. You know, it's so interesting to be at this moment at the crossroads of analog and digital. Or least I think that way. You know whatever, however long this moment is. I mean we can very easily reach back and as we've been hearing we're constantly trying to stay on the outer edge of what's possible with this digital moment. We can still shoot film if we want, but we digitize everything. And so, that is and no joke aside, this sort of dust to digital to analog, and digital. Most of us were born analog, we'll all die digital. And I think that that's a really interesting place to get to live. I often think about how our, you know, how are great archival collections built? However large or small? How are they made? Whose act and whose intent brought them together. And I think this notion of intent that came up a lot, is key. We find many documentary collections that had their origins in just moments of impulse and chance, and kind of a daring, Bergis Jules talked in the dark now, and about Ferguson is you know, nobody sat down and did an RIB proposal before they took to the streets and became documentarians there. And it's a good thing they didn't because they were activists. They were going on gut. And yet, we also know that careful planning, and forecast, and thinking about what goes on say in those Archie Green proposals. Not that those projects don't have chance and impulse embedded in them. But there's all this sort of thinking beforehand about what's going to happen. Our great collections are built by both of those things and all kinds in between. The you know, the recording the making the picture, the interview, going out and doing things is the thrilling and easier, and more inspiring a piece of this puzzle I think. But how we do things that last, that are distinctive, that are important. That then last and live responsibly as they last. How do we take the work that we want to do and make it relevant, and then accessible, and enduring for others. And again, with this whole notion that the history of doing so much of this is the history of colonialism, or the history of having the equipment and therefore you get to tell the story because you happen to be able to afford the thing, the piece of equipment. The discussions of the last day and a half have been so clearly to me about intent, and the deliberate understanding of goals and intent that we see when we start talking about how we should document the web. Probably an area that I know the least about and was finding myself most sort of engaged with. Because it's humbling to even think about, what should we preserve from that whole world. I was struck in those presentations by the more the world is virtual. And I realize these words at least in the academy are really contested, virtual and I'll put aside actual. But the more the world is virtual and the more we understand the web to be that virtual world, the more it may call forth some of the old verities of the actual to work in it. The local, the placed. When talking about the Ferguson collection, we heard that it became most understood and most useful to hear the people who made the work that ended up in the Tweets talk about making the work that ended up in the Tweets. The actual grounded the virtual. That, if I talk too much about that I would begin to sound like a kind of a luddite, but I think there's some truth there. Or, when we hear about vaccines, you know doing work on line about sort of vaccination feelings in northeastern, North Carolina. Without the actual interviews of people what sense does any of that make? How do we get to context without some of those older approaches. Let me take my watch off so I keep track of this. Just as we have and should probably forever ponder what right we might have to go in somebody's backyard and take a photograph. You know when Montana Miller was talking about the web, she's talking about it as a similar tender ethical space that requires us to think of it, not just as a virtual landscape, but maybe as something a little more actual. Those are complicated things. But I think the way that ethics is central to all of it comes really clear and we may see it more clearly when we look at something that we think of as so virtual. I think that thinking about working in those spaces may will require simply to double down on the essential notions of the old. The survey projects, you know, I'm so intrigued to hear Allen, and Carl and others talk about sort of the origins of the of the survey projects. Not that they can; not that they know themselves where all the influences came from, where all the water of that confluence came for them to think about photography and recording, and you know what influence was the FSA. And so on, and the building of these teams. But to hear that and to get a sense of that kind of contextual information. Also, to see you know, how often they photographed the doing and the word reflexive. You know they were meta before meta was coo, to paraphrase a country song. And why they did it. Who knows. Were they doing it so they could come back here and should people at the library that they were actually working? Were they doing it so that we, because they were looking forward? Were they doing it because they noticed in the FSA there were a few pictures like that, and they were really intriguing? Who knows? But I think it allows us to engage with the process in a way that just gets us talking just like I'm talking now. And to think about it. And to think about what it means to be there and to do those kinds of work. When Terry Eiler talked about standing in the same place. Two photographers standing in the same place, taking pictures of the same thing, but very different pictures, is an interesting story, but it's a much larger metaphor of what it means to think about how to build documentary collections. You know, two people happen to be married, but who see things very differently. Two photographs building teams, getting different points of view on the same story. Understanding that of course there's no one version of any story. There's no one photograph of anything. To really humble us to understand that these artifacts we create are impotent even as they are powerful. The you know we live in a moment where sort of gated property has never been more important to people. Physical and intellectual. And the standard and model of the survey project to be in the public domain, it will raise some challenges, probably. And there'll be some pictures and recordings, that go out and people say, man I didn't realize my grandfather signed that form. Of course, it's not perfect. But, if we look at the Farm Security Administration, and I tell my students there are some great photographers in the FSA club and great photographs. But, I always ask them, don't you think maybe the reason we look at those pictures so much is because we can actually use them. We can actually get to them. What's the relationship between quality and access? Or between accuracy and access? And I think the survey projects will take on a life of their own, which is a little scary probably for some people even in this room. But, what better legacy than if 70 years from now people are trying to download Terry's pictures and use them for something. As opposed to the alternative. So, you know, I think that we can learn from that. And I don't know what that means for our work going forward and for projects. But that notion of being able to get to work. And yet we've heard stories where work needs to be where the documentary evidence needs to be really, the access needs to be limited. This notion that Kevin Bradley said, you know, I think I got this right, at the interview he wants to talk we want to listen. It's so much at the foundation of much of what we do. The Archie Green Projects in occupational lure, and this whole notion of a quiet revolution, or the whole notion of recovering voices. The whole idea of giving a voice to people that we don't normally hear from, or normally pay attention to. A hairdresser in Lumberton, North Carolina. You know, we don't know anything about, taking us places we've never been and may not even, wouldn't think to go and building archives around that. It's so much the bedrock of what the Folklife Center is about and what documentary fieldwork is about. And I think that Nancy Gross said something that is a question, not to answer now, but she said you know occupational projects or folklore goes through trends. People are interested and not interested. But I can't think of anything more important to get to than why people work, what they do, how they feel about it. To really get to where we all live. I'm really struck by what we can learn. You know how is it that we can learn so much about what we ought to do now by how people are handling wax cylinder repatriation, reciprocation from the 1890, recordings made in the 1890s. And what the problems of responsibly returning that to communities. But also making it accessible to all of us. And ownership, and ethics. What we can learn from the way those are being handled now and software created. It really can inform how we do our fieldwork now. How we do contemporary fieldwork which is a lot of my own interest, is you know, what's going on around us? What matters? And what are you going to do about it? Which I think is what documentarians often need to be thinking and do anyway. In talking about Ferguson, I think Bergis said something like is there a way to communicate, you know with a collection, through a collection, is there a way to communicate how the values; the values of a collection and how it should be used. You know, what are the values, kind of now how valuable is the collection, but what are the embedded values in that collection. And I think that's so key to figuring out, and sometimes that's a personal choice, if it's a personally created body of work. And sometimes it's a vastly communal choice as I think he was referring to. One way, and I've got, what? I've got about 10 minutes is that right? I want to talk, close with sort of what do I worry about, what do I fret about? I like to fret more than worry. But what do I fret about in thinking about sort of where we are and some of the things I've heard and this whole thing we call folklife and documentary, and building of collections, and then creating access to those collections. And one of the things I kind of, and fret is not as bad as worry, so don't worry. One of the thing sis just the sheer abundance and excess of documentation of today. That calls for even more skills of discernment, of intent, of point of view, of kind of the vision. You know, the word of the decade talked about by everybody is this word curation, which both; I find another way to sort of build walls. I mean it sounds so important that we curate our Facebook page. But this notion of curation, of what matters and what doesn't. And so, while we can sort of rejoice at the fact that everybody in this room at this moment could take a picture of something, simultaneously, or make a recording, or you know, is there a way in which that fact, that mere fact makes us less discerning, less intentional, and gives us less of a purpose in what we were going to. If it all is recorded, then why record anything. And if all is, we're probably being recorded by something anyway. And so, so what is it we want to record and why? And in some ways, that fact that anything can be done and that everybody has a camera in every community at any moment, you're not going to be the first one with the camera at a scene. So, what do you want to do about the fact that you can make a picture? And how deep do you want to go? In some ways it liberates us from doing surveys. I don't mean that literally, survey projects, but it liberates us from having to go far and wide. Because there's people out there far and wide, that can do it with their equipment, with their ideas. I also fret about this notion of what will last. Doug Boyd, very eloquently told about the challenges just of the preservation and access of something as simple as a cardboard box full of cassette tapes, analog tapes. You know, whether to transcribe or not. How long it takes to digitize, all those kinds of things. And so, when you add to that the great proliferation of expressive material that digital technology brings. And there are projects that are sort of like story core, that sort of anticipate that, and wire it in. But there are other times and there are other places where that's not really possible. So, the robust proliferation creates a real problem of preservation and privilege, and perpetual care. The term that they use in the cemeteries, but it's just as relevant to what we do. You know, how do small grassroots community-based organizations or institutions, or families for that matter, care for and ensure the lasting existence of everyday digital documents. The answer I often get is the Cloud , which is you know, if you think about it is a metaphor, it's really not much of an answer. But it is somewhat of an answer I guess. But those digital documents won't fit in a shoebox under the bed, or the corner of a public library where maybe those Penobscot photographs were that are now being reintroduced to the community and in the metadata gotten from community engagement. Digital files don't wait patiently to be a restored like glass plate negatives or 35-millimeter film or 16-millimeter motion picture film, or wax cylinders. The preservation clock begins almost at the moment of conception of the image. And I worry about that. I worry about it because I care about what lasts. We regularly intervene in to work to reframe, and reclaim, and reaffirm ownership. But if things don't last, it's very hard to do. It's very hard to build that reciprocal loop that the cylinder project has been doing for quite a number of years in different ways, if we don't have the cylinders. So, I worry about that. And I also worry about the, not that; I've got 2 minutes, so, and 140 characters right? Not to worry about, not to make light of Twitter or posting, but posting is not a destination. And neither is sort of simply mining the web. It has to be done with this notion of intent. And so, I think that when I talk about fret I want our work to be distinctive, and because it is so fragile I want us to understand how fragile it is. And that alone should make us take it even more seriously. And I think it does. And I think that's one of the things we've heard today and yesterday. Is the fragility of this material, and of the ideas, and of the emotions, and of the ethics is what calls us back and makes it something we're drawn to do. And we should understand that and play on that, work on that. Eudora Welty said about her own photographs, if exposure is essential, still more so is the reflection. And I think it's really the reflection, a lot of what we've been talking about. And you know how do we want to reflect on work, how does work reflect on us? How can we see ourselves in that reflection? And how can we see ourselves with other people in that reflection? It's easier than ever to make the exposure. But what are we going to do about it after that and how are we going to care for it? How are we going to make it relevant? How are we going to look down and see the word time [applause], that I'm up. And that is really I think the bedrock of what's been talked about across all these things from the web to Native American communities. >> Thanks to Tom. I think he's to run and catch a plane. But I think he took most of my time, so that's. >> Tom Rankin: Thank you. [ Applause ] And no questions. >> Elizabeth Peterson: Thanks to Tom, I think he's got to run and catch a plane, but also I think he took most of my time, so that's also, that was a good thing, because [laughter]. Well, here we are, we are at the end of this event. And as someone said earlier, I'm not going to say good-bye, but we will see you again, and in fact I do want to invite everyone here if you are going to be around this afternoon, to please come by the American Folklife Center. We are in the building across the street in the Jefferson Building. Staff would love to see you this afternoon. We'd love to show you around, show you our collections. So, come and hang out with us. I also want to say please pick up materials as you're leaving. Certainly "Folklife and Fieldwork." If you want some copies of that, we would love for you to take that back to where you're going. And also, just a reminder that this has been videotaped. And it will make its way onto our website in the near future, not immediately, but soon, soon. And finally, just a sincere heartfelt thank you to all of you. There was so much great dialogue here. I think as several people commented, and certainly as Tom commented a lot of the issues are about access, but I think we definitely got to see that a lot of the work that we're doing right now is revisiting some of the work from before. And these things aren't you know, just massively, or harkening back to somebody talking about scale, and time, and slow archiving. I think we're probably the personification of slow archiving, but I think the last panel, especially. I mean looking at how long that material has been around, I mean for centuries in the community. How the documentation has evolved, how it's care has evolved, how the ideas about access have evolved. And how it is being reimagined now, and how it will be reimagined 40 years from now. It's a very humbling thing and I think perhaps some of the what I've picked up to day and yesterday is about kind of right sized access. I think we have many different projects here, they all demand different care, different approaches, different solutions about how we can make this material available. How we can get people to engage with it going forward. And you've given us a lot to think about. There's such incredible innovation going on and we look forward to having continued dialogue with everyone. And so, please keep in touch and thank you so much, once again, and thank you for enjoying this moment and talking about the work that we're doing for the last 40 years, and for the next 40 years. So, go forth. Thank you [applause]. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov.