>> Erika Gault: Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. I am Erika Gault, program specialist with the CCDI team. And we are pleased to have our inaugural event Summer Fuse where we get to introduce you to our grantees, our advisory board. And we're also pleased to have our junior fellows with us here today. I will begin with an introduction and welcome of the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden. Dr. Carla Hayden was sworn in as the 14th Librarian of Congress on September 14th, 2016. Hayden, the first woman and the first African American to lead the National Library was nominated to the position by President Barack Obama on February 24th, 2016. And her nomination was confirmed by the US Senate on July 13th. Prior to her latest post, she served since 1993 as CEO of the of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland. Hayden was nominated by President Obama to be a member of the National Museum and Library Services Board in January 2010 and was confirmed to that post by the Senate in June 2010. Hayden was president of the American Library Association from 2003 to 2004. In 1995, she was the first African American to receive Library Journal's Librarian of the Year Award in recognition of her outreach services at the Pratt Library, which included an after school center for Baltimore teens offering homework assistance and college and career counseling. Hayden received a B.A. from Roosevelt University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago. Dr. Hayden. >> Carla Hayden: Being here is wonderful because it is seeing the manifestation of an idea of making the Library of Congress relevant, useful, inspiring for everyone. Everyone in this country. And part of that effort is widening the path to use our collections that we already have, the treasure chest that is the Library of Congress, but also adding to that treasure chest and looking toward the future. And so this program Of the People highlights that effort. And I just want to thank the advisory board members for helping us. It's definitely was starting from scratch and coming up with all the parameters and how we could do it and everything. And then a special thank you to the grantees because you are going to be, I hope when you walk around and you see like the Gutenberg Bible, and you see all of these things, the things that you are bringing to the Library of Congress are going to be here in perpetuity as well. So thank you for being part of this. [ Applause ] >> Erika Gault: Thank you, Dr. Hayden. At this time I would like to introduce to you Judith Conklin who will present the grantees for today. Judith Conklin is the chief information officer for the Library of Congress. She serves as the primary advisor to the Librarian of Congress on all technology matters and as a voting member of the Library's executive committee. She is also a member of the legislative branch CIO Council and the Library's senior agency official for records management. With more than four decades of technology experience, including over 24 years at the Library, Ms. Conklin was appointed CIO in 2021 after serving over six years as deputy CIO. As CIO she is responsible for providing the vision and leadership necessary to ensure that IT operations and services are aligned with the Library's strategic mission and empower the success of the agency. Joining the Library in 1997 as a network manager overseeing agency telecommunication systems. Ms. Conklin led the design and implementation of the Library's first in-building cellular system and played a leading role in several multiagency legislative branch initiatives including the assessment of the legislative branch Capitol Hill network and the implementation of the first joint legislative branch data center. Ms. Conklin began her career in the US Army serving in progressive technical leadership roles and the US Signal Corps. She retired from the Army as a Major. Ms. Conklin holds a Master's of Science degree in computer information systems from Webster University and a Bachelor of Science degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. At this time, Ms. Conklin. [ Applause ] >> Judith Conklin: Thank you for the introduction, Erika. I'd like to join Dr. Hayden in welcoming you to our celebration today. It's really great to see people in person now. It's been a very long two years of the pandemic. We launched CCDI during the pandemic, in the height of the pandemic. And this is the first time the board and our grantees have been able to come together in person. It's exciting to be able to bring this group of innovative thinkers together. I'm excited to be with you all. Dr. Hayden's vision, our vision, is that the Library of Congress is connected to all Americans, open that treasure chest. And I like to look at it from moving from analog to digital with our collections. And the more we move into the digital world, the more we can do innovative things. As CIO, it is my job to ensure we have the technology we need at the Library of Congress to make this vision, Dr. Hayden's vision, a reality. Amazing things can be done when we invite people to push the boundaries of technology to unlock new ways of seeing and experiencing the Library's collections. Since 2017, our Innovator in Residence Program has helped us reimagine how Americans can engage with our collections through digital innovation. As part of our Of the People campaign, CCDI is intended to go a step further. Empowering creators to combine Library collections with technology, to find and share stories from communities of color and to connect Americans with a more expansive understanding of our past and future. It's an exciting time to be in technology by the way. With us today are our first round of CCDI grant recipients to tell us more about the work they are doing to make this vision a reality. Our first scholar in residence, Maya Cade, will tell us about her work with the Black Film Archive and her two year residency with CCDI. Jameela Salaah and Ann Schoenenberger from the Kenton County Public Library along with their partner artist phrie world will tell us about their work as our first Library's archive and museum's grand recipient. And last, but certainly not least, Bree'ya Brown, the project lead from Huston-Tillotson University will join us virtually to talk about the work they are doing as our first higher education grantee. Please join us in welcoming our CCDI grantees. [ Applause ] And now, let me hand this over to Maya to get us started. >> Maya Cade: Hi. Awesome. Hi everyone. I'm Maya Cade, the Library's Connecting Communities' digital initiative scholar in residence. Woo! [ Applause ] I'm overjoyed to be sharing a little bit about myself and my project with you all. Let's start with the project team. My project team is me. I am the creator and curator of Black Film Archive, an evolving digital archive of Black films currently streaming. I am also a fall 2022 program in residence at Indiana University cinema, writer, film programmer. Most recently, a guest programmer for Apple TV and have an upcoming program with the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures of Arts and Sciences. And am proud researcher. I am based in Brooklyn, New York, and a lifelong fan of all cinema. My favorite film is Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death, 1946. Noting this feels especially important to me because it exemplifies two things about me. I'm abundantly optimistic, and I believe love and tenderness as a matter of life and death suggests, can change the trajectory of our lives. Let's talk about Black Film Archive. My work for Black Film Archive began in the wake of the George Floyd protests and was in response to a growing question among Black Americans. How does the media, especially film, represent our history and can ever be an accurate memorialization of our lives? I knew what I had to do. What began as a Twitter thread transformed into what slate.com calls the definitive history of Black cinema. As the creator and curator of this evolving digital archive, my main concern is centering Black people's film knowledge. And it should also be noted, I am the copywriter, fact checker, researcher, designer, art department and director of Black Film Archive. Let's talk about project goals. For my Tenderness Project, I have the privilege of building out Black Film Archive with the Library's resources. I'll be creating an expansive annotated filmography of tenderness in Black film from early film history to today. Finding points of public engagement with a scholarship and creating a short film where I'll be in conversation with Black filmmakers and writers about how tenderness has shaped their work. The desire for this project began long before Black Film Archive was a reality as I've always seen the world through tenderness and am searching through the archives for tender moments. My working definition of tenderness for the project as it's seen on screen is noted gentleness, affection, care and comfort whether romantic, familial, community-centered or with oneself. My immediate goal is to clarify my scope and begin researching with this definition in mind. My greatest hope for this project is for it to be another entry point for Black people to engage with the abundant past of Black cinema. In a moment where Black films are often seen on a rigid binary, I hope tenderness can be a window to deeper engagement of cinemas present, past and future. But let's talk about my theory in action. Take Michael Schultz's Cooley High which I describe on Black Film Archive as a slice of life film that focuses on the lives of two best friends and the 1960s Chicago Northside as their life takes an abrupt turn during the last few weeks of their senior year of high school. This film has been a steady influence for generations of Black filmmakers. With my Tenderness Project, I also hope to note that the tenderness these two best friends share throughout this film is an impetus for the characters' lives to shift, and as a result, the viewer as well. The Library of Congress's collections give me a wealth of resources to imagine and dream and find all tenderness can be in the archives. I am particularly looking forward to working with a wonderful team at the Moving Image desk. I believe that any relationship is a two-way street. I'm excited to contribute my findings to the Library's inflectional life as possible. In the next slides, I'll provide detailed examples of how the Library's collections will shape the future of my work. The French and American Alice Guy-Blache is known as one of the earliest woman filmmakers working. Her 1912 A Fool and His Money held in the Library's Image Research Center is one of the earliest narrative films with an all-Black cast. It gives us a very early glimpse of tenderness between many Black people in film. Spencer Williams's jazz-inflicted late directing career future film Beale Street Mama named after the jazz standard of the same name is currently held in the Library of Congress's Black film collection. I would use this film among countless others and expansive collections to construct my annotated filmography of tenderness. The Race, Ethnicity and Civil Rights on Television News Programs and Films Collection offers real world accounts of civil rights on film. I'm particularly interested in profiles of Black figures in this collection and how tenderness shaped their life. For example, The Weapons of Gordan Parks shown here displays a man who walks through love as his guide with his weapon of choice, his camera. In this film he states his famous ethos. I can only hope that the weapons they choose will be tempered with love instead of hatred. Thank you for your time. I'd like to introduce the next speakers, Kenton County Public Library. [ Applause ] >> phrie worlds: Good afternoon, everyone. Hi. I'm phrie, and I come to you from the Ohio borderland with my colleagues from the Kenton County Public Library. I come from a family of Northern Kentucky culture producers. And our project is loosely called Crafting Stories, Making History and Documenting the Black Experience in Northern Kentucky. I'm phrie, culture producer, public folklorist and project curator. I'm here with Ann Schoenenberger who's the director of the project and digital librarian at the Kenton County Public Library, and my colleague Jameela Salaah, who's a resident and community organizer at The Center for Great Neighborhoods in Covington, Kentucky. So where is Covington, Kentucky? It's not in the mountains. It's an urban city in Kentucky. And so as you can see on the map on the left, if you can locate Washington D.C. on the East Coast, and if you go straight left, you'll see Cincinnati, Ohio, and it sits on the Ohio River. And we point to Covington, Kentucky which is directly underneath it. This is the land of Margaret Garner, whose story inspired Toni Morrison's Beloved. So when we zoom in on the right, you'll see that it's located in the Cincinnati MSA between Ohio, Kentucky and neighboring Indiana. It's a border land that stretches for 980 miles and serves as a continuation of the Mason Dixon line. Just to help you understand where we are. So we zoom into this aerial shot and you can see that the densely urban area is Downtown Cincinnati, and directly across from is Northern Kentucky. It's urban, yes, in Kentucky. It's not in the mountains. So we zoom in, and you can see on the Ohio River there is multiple bridges, and directly across from it is the urban city of Covington, Kentucky. And located on there are several significant cultural institutions in the historically Black East Side community where my family is from. Here on the left you'll see an ancestral home, the home of my great, great, great-grandmother, Nettie Pearson who was born into slavery here in the East Coast on Maryland, migrated and was sent to Montgomery, Alabama and migrated with my family to Covington, Kentucky directly across from Cincinnati. And so for the course over the next year, we will essentially create a folk school and organize community members to document our stories and do community research and make art. Here, you can see some old photographs. On the left, you can see the Lincoln-Grant School, which is one of the only schools for Negro children in Northern Kentucky. And this is groundbreaking. Up top, you'll see the Carnegie Public Library of Covington, Kentucky, which was not only one of the only integrated public spaces in Covington, Kentucky, but one of the first integrated libraries in the South. And you can see on the bottom a Sanborn map that shows the location of this historically black community located right next to another river. So it's a city between two rivers. Here to the left you'll see my aunt, Patricia Humphries Fann who was a publisher and founder of The Suspension Press with a mission to connect Kentucky to Hamilton County in Cincinnati. And so what we'll do is continue with that legacy and bring back this community newspaper that helped to share voices in our community by digitizing it, because it has not been digitized. And so we'll use this to connect it with the Library of Congress materials to create and excavate our own resources and stories. And so continuing in that tradition of the Black press, yeah, we'll continue. And so here's my friend, Anne Schoenenberger, who'll tell you more about how we'll be using the Library of Congress's materials to amplify and make creative stories. [ Applause ] >> Anne Schoenenberger: We're very excited to take our local stories and make those connections to the larger stories in the Library of Congress. One of the examples I put together some of what we found. We know that we'll find much more as we go through the year. So one of our first programs will be quilting. So we'll look into the Quilt Making in America Collection and the images and those wonderful oral histories from the South. Another example, I will have some public programming to connect people to the collections through books and stories. So one of the books we'll read is Vanguard by Dr. Martha S. Jones, which features in the intro, if you read, she starts with her family who has roots in Danville, Kentucky. And Fannie Williams was a teacher at Lincoln-Grant that phrie mentioned, and her husband was the principal. So among, besides her family, the book has wonderful history of African American women who made an impact on our country. So we will dive into their stories, connect with our local, how they connected locally. And then we'll come to the Library of Congress for the Mary Church Terrell Collection and look at things like her diary that if you read it, you will really, you will connect to it because of the first person perspective. We're also, I'm incredibly excited as a public librarian to utilize what the Library of Congress has created already to help us engage with the public and how do we bring the art, how do we bring these digital materials to life, get our hands on the history. That is what I'm working toward. Some of the examples, the lesson plans, the activity guides, you have Citizen DJ. And one of my favorite discoveries is the Rosa Parks activity with Amos Kennedy, Jr. and his work through Letter Press, illustrates her words artistically. So we want to have labs in the library, in the community where people are doing the same. So we'll not only use that but sort of expand on that for the other things we discover. Also, Jason Reynolds, the national ambassador for young people's literature did an incredible YouTube series called Write, Right, Rite. And the Grab the Mic Program that he's done is, we're going to use it with youth and everybody we can in the community. So these are examples of our core activities. The main part of our program is the Artist in Residence, phrie is one of them. And we'll be working in the community with two others who guide and lead us. We'll also do some mini grants to give residents support so they'll have financial resources to make things and build skills in community research. And then we'll be in the schools. We'll be writing about what we're doing and sharing what we're doing trying to engage people. And finally, we'll have a celebration in April which Jameela is going to talk more about. [ Applause ] >> Jameela Salaah: Thank you. And I am going to highlight a few of the core activities that we'll be doing within the next year. The first one activity is our historical event that will be happening at the end of July. We'll be partnering with an organization called Learning Through Art to Spark Truth and Reconciliation Community Conversations. We will discuss current events, history and other topics that the group is passionate about while creating a quilt to tell those stories. Famously, Covington has a yearly event called Old Timers. This is a reunion or a homecoming rather for the residents and their families across the region and country to come back to Covington and celebrate the community here, in the East Side specifically. During this event, we will have a resident who will have a portable sound booth who will be collecting intergenerational stories on various topics. They will receive a flash drive copy of a story shared, and with their permission, their stories will be archived for others to experience. During all of our community engagement events, we will be utilizing the free to use and reuse collection. This will help us with ease of access and connection with the Library of Congress. This will help people use their strength of curiosity, ask questions, find materials that have meaning to them and help them illustrate understand their own story. We will also be having a Public Library Series, so this look like monthly story spotlights as well as maker space activities such as button making and grieving, poster printing and coding to create memory art as a way to memorialize Covington and the community. We'll also be providing a leadership development program that is held at the five public elementary schools in Covington. During this program, we'll help identify and build on the children's personal character strengths to aid them in becoming more confident, resilient and emerging leaders in their community. Each school will create and complete a service learning project for their school and neighborhood with the subject pertaining to oral and digital history and storytelling. Again in April we will have an exhibit to celebrate the community and showcase the work that has been done. We will also be recognizing and rewarding community members who have and continue to preserve a history of Covington and the East Side. Thank you for listening, and I will turn it over to the next speaker. [ Applause ] >> Erika Gault: Thank you, Maya and Kenton County Library. At this time, we have one virtual presenter. Our grantee is joining us from Texas from Huston-Tillotson. We have Bree'ya Brown. [ Applause ] >> Bree'ya Brown: Hi. I'm going to use my screen. Hello everyone. My name is Bree'ya Brown. I'm the university archivist for Huston-Tillotson University. I service HTU's affiliates and its greater communities through preservation of the archives, special collections and manuscripts that represent the university's history. Thank you for attending this presentation to learn about the project titled Harlem Renaissance Meets Huston-Tillotson University. HT University is the oldest institution in Austin and one of the nine historically Black institutions in the state of Texas. A little historical background about the institution. Samuel Huston College was founded by Reverend George Warren Richardson in Dallas, Texas in 1876. And before the end of its first year, West Texas Methodist Episcopal Church adopted the college. Then the religious institution moved to East Austin two years later into the basement of what is now Wesley United Methodist Church. And Tillotson College was started by Reverend George Jeffrey Tillotson in 1877. It was built on what we have called for generations Blue Bonnet Hill, which is in the exact spot where the university is currently. Tillotson College was also supported and promoted by the Freedmen's Aid Society and the American Missionary Association during its early years. Then in October of 1952, the two institutions merged and formed Huston-Tillotson College. And in February of 2005, it was officially established as a university. HT student body population is a vital entity that contributes to the collaborative narrative that spans generations. And despite this compelling legacy, in conjunction with technologies and digital resources, HT student population experiences are not widely known. Nevertheless, through opportunities such as artist's residencies, instruction and support, they can tell their own stories that pivot their experiences to the center and connects to the past and present thus building a stronger future for themselves. The purpose of the project aims to emphasize the ongoing legacies of Black culture and education in the United States by means of archival materials owned by the Library of Congress and Huston-Tillotson University. The staff at the Downs-Jones Library wants to provide a four-month long art residency to undergraduates at HT who are interested in using their own methods to recreate a chosen art form from the 1920s and 1930s Harlem Renaissance era. The Downs-Jones Library staff will work with students regularly and eventually we'll all go to visit Washington D.C. to gain a more personal connection to the Library of Congress. And we hope by providing an opportunity such as this one, it will empower students to share their talents and create a rich experience for themselves. Moreover, the staff here wants to purposefully show Austin's communities the significance of the institution, which our former university president Dr. Colette Pierce Burnett calls a jewel in the center of Austin's violet crown. There are six dependable individuals on the Downs-Jones Library team who contribute to the day-to-day operations. A concise introduction about our team and the role in our project. Ariel Radock, Marisa Talamantes and Elizabeth Lopez serve as exhibit assistants on the project. And they are currently working with me on archival projects and will later work with student art residents to coordinate the physical inhouse display of their projects as well as create the digital exhibit the Omega S. Katrina Ashton serves as the co-principal investigator and technical specialist. She's responsible for ensuring compliance with university policies and procedure as well as government policy regulations. And as technical specialist, she assists with all technological features of the project. David Sylvia serves as the storytelling creator on this project. In his role, Sylvia will establish, develop and coordinate guidelines for student research, design and narration of storytelling prompts that will be curated for access by community participants to the digital exhibit. And I am the coprincipal investigator and project manager. I coordinate the completion of projects on time, within budget and within scope. And I'm also responsible for the execution of the project initiative. And lastly, we are marketing the Downs-Jones Library Artist in Residence Program that will support five to eight undergraduates for a four-month long residency in the fall of 2022. Students will be able to choose and recreate one or two pieces from the Library of Congress's digital collection, and they'll also have the option to juxtapose material from the Downs-Jones Library and special collections if they choose. We have managed to choose a list of collections or digital collection from the Prints and Photographs Collection, the Movie Image Collection, the Newspaper and Current Periodical Collection and also the Performing Arts Collection, which is all accessible via the Library of Congress's Digital Collections website. For example, I pulled the New York Daily Worker from 1920 that highlights events during the Harlem Renaissance. Students can use formats such as these, manuscripts, photographs, correspondences, sound recordings, play scripts, novels, poetry, dance, painting. Anything that students can readapt from their own perspective. Students are also able to apply their skill or major such as computer science to create animation. Students are also welcome to use archival materials from HT's archive such as photographs, newspapers, yearbooks, programs and manuscripts to complete their projects. Here you can see University newspapers published by Samuel Huston College in 1928 and Tillotson College in 1932. Students are to make selections from each collection, about one or two pieces, to inspire them. And they will recreate or adapt the format of their choice providing a story narrative around the work. The final project should link the chosen items, the content areas and the student's perspectives. And finally, their work will be available on an exhibit on campus, and it will also be open to the public. And we will also launch a digital exhibit. The physical exhibit will present students' presentation of archival material in parallel with HT's archival collection creating a chance for the audience to connect contemporary art with the historical materials from the era. And audiences online and in person will be able to engage with each exhibit's interactive content by reading about the highlighted artists as well as viewing and listening to their story narratives created by the art residents. Thank you. >> Erika Gault: Now, I would like to have a brief time for questions and answers both from our virtual audience as well as those present in the room. We'll star off with Bree'ya since she's joining us virtually. If you have any questions, there are microphones available for your questions. And Laurie will be sharing those questions with us folks that are joining us virtually. Just to start us off, perhaps Bree'ya, you could speak a bit about the connection between the history and those present students that you hope to engage with the Library of Congress collections. What makes this work so important? Why is it so important to connect them to this kind of history of your institution and this one, Library of Congress. >> Bree'ya Brown: Sure. Well, HT is the oldest institution in Austin, and given the fact that we have competition across the I-35 UT Austin and then also the private university Saint Edwards, there isn't a lot of recognition of a historically Black institution here in the city even though it's not that big. Also, because of the location in which the institution is, which is on the East Side of Austin, historically, it has been placed here because that is where the Black and Brown population was designated after the Master Plan in 1928 that essentially segregated Austin. So with that, there's plenty of history here. And the students, the alumni, the staff and the presidents, they have essentially made East Austin this omega for Black and Brown culture. But specifically, it's important to highlight the students who are here now. Because everything that reflects in the present day, the students get to benefit. And it is significant to offer students a chance to express themselves in the way that they feel is appropriate and also to gain better perspective toward their future. So initiating an artist in residence feels like the best method because we would be able to give students autonomy to use the collections within HT's archive as well as the Library of Congress's collection. And we chose the theme of the Harlem Renaissance because honestly wanted to highlight Black joy in the United States. And the Harlem Renaissance, although it was a tough era with segregation and post-reconstruction, it also highlighted Black figures down from the arts, novels, playwrights, et cetera, who really emerged during that time. And I really wanted to reflect on what Tillotson College and Samuel Huston College were doing between the 1920s and the 1930s. And then juxtapose that into what students are doing now to highlight Black joy, Black excellence and also education. >> Erika Gault: Thank you. Thank you, very relevant connections to the past and the present. Thank you. Do we have any questions before we move on? So I'd like to think about some of the very rich ideas that come across in the stories you tell about your own communities and for you, Maya, in thinking about the kind of work that you do. I guess it'll be good to start out and thinking about Black film as you talk about it. You mentioned an idea that really struck me about Black film having the capacity to change the trajectory of our lives. What does that mean for you in relationship to how you make use of collections or how you're thinking about your own work. >> Maya Cade: What a simple question. >> Erika Gault: I thought I would start out with something simple. >> Maya Cade: Is this on? Okay. Yeah, I think that, I think there's a simple, not a simple answer, but I think the answer I can give is really Black film has been seen on a binary lately. I think people often reference the same kind of 12 films, one of those being 12 Years a Slave and, not to say this isn't a wonderful film. I truly think it is. But I think that when we look to the past we understand that there are more expansive ideas of Blackness that we can glean from. And the past is so much to say its knowledge is endless. And what it can give to us is endless. So yes, and that shifts lives. Yeah. >> Erika Gault: Yeah, so we've been dealing with about 12 films, and you would say it's more expansive. >> Maya Cade: Yes, it really is much more expansive. And I think, you know, from Black Film Archive, my website is turning a year in August. And I think -- >> Erika Gault: Congratulations. >> Maya Cade: Thank you. Something I've learned is that when you give people the tools to untap knowledge without assuming that they have them or don't but provide them the proper context, they can fly with what's available in the past. That's really all I see this work doing. And tenderness is a prompt giving them a new avenue to explore Black film, which I think is essential. >> Erika Gault: What I love about all of you all's projects is they really move us to thinking more expansively about the past and communities that only often get a monolith or, as you say, a binary. And so when we think, for instance, about the work that you all are doing at Kenton, it really provides a diverse portrait of a single community. Can you say a bit more about what energizes about that work or what brought you to telling this diverse narrative? >> phrie worlds: Hello. Hi. I'm glad that you actually mentioned the word binary because the driving force behind all of this work is really cultivated a sense of place in the Ohio River border lands. And so looking at a border community on a border that sits for 980 miles long, and so really, you know, being able to tap into. Because it's not the Mexico border. It's not the Canada border, but for some time in this country it has been. And so it went into the 20th century with Jim Crow and continues today. And so what really drives it is like being able to tap into that magic of that liminality of being in a border community. But really, a lot of my work is in Cincinnati. I'm from both sides. And so being always having to choose between Cincinnati and Kentucky. So I didn't feel seen in Cincinnati. And so as you see since Covington is in the Cincinnati MSA. And so in Cincinnati, everybody, nobody talks about Kentucky. It's like, you know, Cincinnati is right there. It has all the benefits of being right next to Kentucky. But nobody mentioned Kentucky. And so I'm like I don't fee seen. I was like it's been such a significant part of who I am. There's so many significant culture producers and artists who were influential in Cincinnati and nobody knows they're from Elsmere and Covington. And so it's this very rich community, this one singular community, that has been a cultural center of Black life in Northern Kentucky. But it's just under, a sense of place and feeling seen and being proud. But we're ritual people. WE make holidays. >> Erika Gault: And Jameela, you have anything to add? >> Jameela Salaah: Hello. Okay, I would like to add to phrie saying like a sense of place and meaning and being seen. I am a Covington resident. I was born and raised there. Specifically in the East Side that is historically Black. And growing up just kind of learning and seeing, kind of like how people perceived Covington positively and negatively. And from a young age, I knew that I wanted to be a part of that in the sense of sparking emerging leadership, right. So not caring about what your status is and who you are in the sense of professionalism. But you have the power to change your community in many different ways, whether you're an older person, a youth, a resident who's been there forever and a new resident who's coming in for the first couple of years. And for me, it's very personally deeply rooted in helping the community in that sense to build that confidence in these communities and these neighborhoods to have a sense of place that they feel proud to call their home. >> Ann Schoenenberger: And at the library, we're so excited to be able to partner with the Library of Congress in their effort, the larger effort to tell all the stories. Are we telling all the stories in the community to bring a focus on the African American community within Kenton County is so important. And we're so excited that we have this, you know, we're just, it's almost like we're given this wonderful support that we can just, you know, beam brightly in the community with this extra, this grant allows that. And so looking at our, the way that we're working, look at our staff. Are we telling all the stories, and that's what our work is from within the library. >> Erika Gault: Thank you. Thank you to each of you, to our grantees for these very rich projects that you have and for sharing a bit of your journey with us today, to our audience for joining us for this segment. This brings us to the conclusion of our Q and A. And we will reconvene following our break. Thank you to you all. [ Applause ] >> Olivia Dorsey: Welcome back. We are fortunate enough to be joined by a talented group of experts for the CCDI Advisory Board. They have such a rich set of experiences in their approaches to sites of cultural memory that center the lives, experiences and perspectives of communities of color. As the Library continues to vision ahead, we wanted to bring in our advisory board to dream and to vision with us. Looking toward the future and helping us imagine how the Library can fulfill its mission in becoming accessible to all Americans. It is my pleasure and my honor to introduce six individuals from our nine member advisory board. On stage you'll find them from left to right, first being Dr. Andre Brock. Dr. Brock is an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. His award winning book titled Distributed Blackness, African American Cybercultures Theorizes Black Everyday Lives Mediated by Networked Technologies. Brian Carpenter is the curator of indigenous materials at the American Philosophical Society Library and Museum. He has worked with over 80 Native communities throughout North America to enhance their access to archival materials at APS. Jennifer Ferretti is an artist information professional and Digital Library Federation senior program officer at the Council on Library and Information Resources. Jennifer is the founder and principal of We Hear, LLC. Dr. Gabrielle Foreman is the founding faculty director of The Colored Conventions Projects found at coloredconventions.org and is a founding codirector of the Center for Black Digital Research/#digblack. She is professor of English, African American studies and history at Penn State where she also holds a name chair. Bari Talley is the tribal library coordinator for the Karuk tribe including the Sipnuuk storage basket digital repository in an effort to manage, share, enhance understanding of Karuk history, language, traditions, natural resource management and living culture. And last but not least, Janet Tom. Janet Tom received the I Love My Librarian Award in 2020 for developing programs at the San Francisco Public Library that transformed lives and communities. Programs such has her Death and Dying series, the Chinese Alzheimer's forum for Chinese language speakers, intergenerational housing and more brought speakers and attendees together to create ongoing dialogue. We're also missing three of our advisory board members. Another advisor board member Dr. Jewon Woo is listening in virtually. And two of our advisory board members, Elizabeth Mendez-Berry and Samip Mallick are unable to join us today. We are excited to have our advisory board members here today to begin a conversation that helps us ensure that the Library tells the full story of our country's history and is a place that's welcoming to all. To pull from Dr. Robin D. G. Kelley's work, Freedom Dreams, and I quote, "Struggle is par for the course when our dreams go into action. But unless we have the space to imagine and a vision of what it means to fully realize our humanity, all the protests and demonstrations in the world won't bring about our liberation." As part of their work on the CCDI Advisory Board, we asked our board members to review the Library's mission statement and develop brief concept papers to share their digital vision for the Library in 2030. With this discussion, we'd like to offer a sneak peek into what they wrote. So I'll go ahead and start with the first question. Samip Mallick in his response paper offered a response to the Library of Congress mission statement to a question we asked him in his role on the CCDI Advisory Board. He said, and I quote, "One of the limitations I see in the Library of Congress's existing mission statement is that it is centered around demonstrating the continued relevance and importance of the institution itself, i.e. growing collections, expanding user base, et cetera, in order to secure the Library's position." What we would happen if we took the institution out of the mission and instead made the focal point serving the various critical information needs that Americans have today? He goes on to talk about ways he'd like to see the Library decenter itself in favor of supporting the information needs of others and supporting knowledge communities in new ways. I'll start with Dr. Foreman for the first question. Dr. Foreman, you also talked a lot about dreams of collaboration, and you have some concrete experiences as well as ideas. Would you share with us a little bit about the kinds of collaborations you'd like to see the Library engage in? >> Dr. Gabrielle Foreman: First, Olivia, I want to thank you for all of the introductions and the work that went in from the whole staff to bring us here today. So we want to thank you for your vision and your work. You know, when you ask the question about 2030, it really does sort of emphasize both the long term institutional strength and longevity of a place like the Library of Congress but also the fact that we have to look to seven years, right, as an imaginative arc, right. So the difficulty, the challenges of moving an institution of this magnitude embedded in a congressional structure, right, to even think or imagine change. What does 2030 mean, right? So it seems to me that those are some of the kinds of questions that the critique or the invitation, right, to reimagine the service by the people for the people, right, the treasure chest. How do we open up that treasure chest is a question about how are we accountability to both time and place, right? How do we make ourself accountable to communities? So if we're thinking about partnerships in that way, it seems to me that one of the questions is how do we think about collections that have not already had the institutional and historical imprimatur to find themselves in places like the Library of Congress, right. And that's what the digital offers us in so many ways, right. So that the print collections, the things that have been collected, that then are digitized, already have that imprimatur. If we think beyond what's already at the Library of Congress and think of it not as a first or a second cousin but as a sibling of something that belongs in the house that has the keys to the house, right. You know, because you're family, you're really family, right. Not somebody who got to plan, knock on the door, right, and it smells like guests do after three days. Right, you know. Then we're talking about a different sensibility of building not only a neighborhood of knowledge, right, but a family that is not always emphasizing a kind of hierarchy of belonging, right, that we've inherited. So we thought about the way in which we might partner with the Library of Congress and the weaving, a large weave, We the People, that We. But also the examples of the We, right. So we're thinking about the Color Conventions. We've already partnered a little bit with both Smithsonian and the Library of Congress on By the People transcription project of the Mary Church Terrell Papers. And we did that for Douglass Day, which I was just saying to people, it's February 14th. It's Frederick Douglass's chosen birthday. And it's also the day that Carla Hayden was actually nominated by Barack Obama, right, to be the head here. And we're thinking, and we call it a day of collective love for Black history. So how do we bring people to the transcription of records? How do we invite them to think of themselves as people who have keys to the treasure chest, not people who have to write that invitation. And when we go to the By the People transcription here, right, at the Library of Congress, when we go to that page, how do we make sure that it's welcoming to indigenous communities to African American communities to Latinx communities that they see themselves there in that programming. And I'd invite people to go there now and see if that actually is true, like today. Like on your phones. Like if you go there now, is that true, right? So how do we make sure that that politics of visibility, of invitation, of accountability, of opportunity of engagement is present. And that might be through concrete partnerships, right, with people like Douglass Day. And that brings the strength of the infrastructure that the Library of Congress has, right, to the partnership with other people who can bring those collectives, those networks right into the community of that We the People, right. And so I think those are one of the examples that might get us started and having conversations about partnerships and about thinking through the temporal arc of belonging, right. Communities of color, and I think all of us know that sign like man, I'm tired of waiting, that civil rights, right, like man, I'm tired of waiting, right. And waiting in a moment of political retraction, right, is a different thing to ask of communities of color. So how should we also think, right? Yes, we can think about 2030 because we're institution with longevity. But how do we know how that sounds to communities who have been waiting already for a long time for change? >> Olivia Dorsey: Yes. I love so much of what you said. [ Applause ] So much of your response and talking about engagement with communities and ensuring that communities feel like they belong in institutions such as the Library of Congress. I feel that that's so important. And I feel like another aspect of belonging is storytelling too, helping people find themselves in the stories that are held in the treasure trove of the Library of Congress. My next question is for Janet. In your concept paper you talked about storytelling as a critical way for the public to engage and to being dialogued with the Library. You referenced Story Core as a successful implementation of that. You suggested that the Library considered collaborating with an external organization on a campaign you call Find Your Story. Do you mind expanding a little bit about on that? >> Janet Tom: All right. Does everyone know what Story Core is? It was a successful program that we're, in our library San Francisco Public, they brought in like a physical structure of the box. And they invited people to come in and sit there and tell their stories. And a number of my friends did it. You know, my sister and, you know, we chatted and I guess it's in somebody's library. So my thought, and I work at a public library, if you asked, if I asked anyone who came up to the desk, reference desk, have you ever heard of the Library of Congress? Everyone has heard of the Library of Congress. Have you ever used the Library of Congress? You can use the Library of Congress? I thought it was for scholars. Or isn't a library for people that work in Congress? And now that Dr. Hayden wants to make the People's Library, how do we get the news out. So you have to get the news out by telling people it exists and that you can use it. How can I use the Library of Congress? So my idea was, we talked about stories weaving. So my idea was to start an awareness campaign called Weaving Your Stories, put it as a link on the website. And in that, in that link, put in storytellers from all these different local communities, of all ethnicities and races. So in San Francisco, for instance, I know a Japanese American couple, and they do stories about Japanese Americans. Brenda's grandpa and how he had to scratch the rocks and the seaweed when he was growing up. And I think that people identify with their own communities, first of all, and then other communities. Because people want to learn. And especially, of course, their own. So my idea was as a public awareness campaign was to get local storytellers in local communities, and we need to find their stories and put them on the website. And then have a campaign. The American Library Association has campaigns every year, and what they do is they then pass it around to all the libraries and say here's a little bit of funding. We want you to get this out. So my idea was called findyourstory@loc.gov. And first of all, everybody's going to say well what's loc.gov, right. And then, of course, you have to explain it. There's a little bit of a training program because you have to train the librarians to tell people what there are. So I don't think we need a big expensive PR campaign or anything. I think we need to go through what we already have, which are libraries, especially public libraries, and start it going. We can, and you know, I think what I'd like to see happen is, it might happen for me. Let's say I go into, I don't know my story, I go into it, I learn about Chinese Americans through one of my local storytellers. And I'll say, you know, I'd like to learn more about my grandfather and my great-grandparents. And this will kind of kick off my interest because I've seen somebody do it, professionally of course. But it peaked my interest. Now I'll go to my public library and get more information. And then it'll lead me to the Library of Congress because they might have materials about my ancestors. So this is my idea to get it out there and to create a learner's campaign through Weaving Stories. >> Olivia Dorsey: Awesome. [ Applause ] I feel that part of, one of the themes in this discussion is focusing more on the people who we want to invite into the Library and perhaps moving a little bit away from the institution as being like this big, scary institution that people don't even know that they can go to to do research at. My next question is for Brian. You also have some experience in trying to decenter institutional priorities. Every center and organization towards broader expertise held outside of the institutions where some of these cultural records are held. Do you mind speaking to some of those experiences? >> Brian Carpenter: Sure. So this concept of institution like where I work is similarly an old institution that has a large building with columns in it that look imposing and unapproachable to lots of people, even when it's trying to express prestige but not always, giving this confusing image that it presents out to the general public. I find that in places I go whether it's there at any library or archive, there are instances happening all the time. Often through great struggle to get through and access of people doing this incredible energy surrounding the use of the materials. And we can in an institution understandably but wrongly think that we have something to do with that. But it's really not. It's often, it's between the materials and the people using them meaningfully. And often the institution is the last, is clueless that this is occurring. So I can share like a couple like small examples. I had a reference request several years ago where someone was writing and saying I'm from the such and such office of this first nation, and we'd like to get digital copies of those photographs that you sent to us back in the 90s and that we printed that book about. I was like I. They said it's in the such and such A. Irving Hallowell papers and it's like 20, 30 photographs. And so I went to our finding aid about this, and I saw this section of this under the collection, but there was this vast section of photographs that were numbered. And there was a set, a couple of them appeared to have place names. But and it looked like some, if you kind of looked through them in order that they were, this seems to be a new place from starting here and then up to here. But it would, just listed under unidentified photographs. So I learned more about this, and we digitized them and I found out that yes, they had gotten copies of this in the early 90s. They printed a book about it, identified all the people in the photographs. And it had subsequently become the subject of a lot of energy they talked, and we actually had a copy of the little booklet in the Library. And all that information in the book that never got connected back to the materials themselves. And I was fascinated by this. And I think they sent us the copy of it, or I'm not sure about that. But then that had subsequently become, they were now getting back in touch because the use of those photographs was useful to an application of ensuring beneficial land use and water use of this particular community. And here we were sitting and thinking oh, we've got this collection here of these photographs and surely someone will come to us and use them. And then we'll say here you go, and now you can use them. But they'd been, all of these things had been going on, and we were the last to find out about it. So what are the mechanisms that make it not where we had been last to find out about this. And part of it was this approachability thing that Janice talked about and Dr. Foreman talked about. Another example we work with this end of nation called Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, which is in Northern Michigan. And we started working with them about 10 years ago, and one of the things they said, oh yeah, we've been working with APS collections since the 90s. Actually, we used materials from your Library to get our federal recognition reinstated through congressional legislation. Which they were the first tribe to get their status reaffirmed through congressional legislation using archival materials. That's a novel use of things that we had never heard about. So from hearing, and they proceeded to tell us all these other things about stuff that was in plain sight in our collections that we didn't know about. And from talking to a variety of places like this, this kind of refrain people will say things like oh yeah, we didn't tell you that because we didn't know you were interested in various forms. And at various periods it may have been true that we weren't interested. But even if you are, then people may not know about that. And all these uses are things that people did in periods where they had to do it through a lot of, to get through a lot of walls. In a lot of cases they had to go through third parties. Even when things were accessible, they didn't know that they were approachable. So those are your stories of people who got through that. There are all these other instances of potential, of this potential, highly relevant use of materials that's not happening because of these approachability issues, accessibility issues. So the, I think the art for institutions is to see, in terms of making it, to think of ourselves as making the institution relative to those uses. Like if you want to see what community means or see how they're being used. And it can be, look very simple or like straightforward like identifying names in photographs, but those have really further applications and relevance beyond the imagination of what the Library would ever think about. So look at what, in terms of adapting institutions, priorities to community needs, see what communities are doing and then say do we have the resources to make ourselves relevant to what people want to make happen. [ Applause ] >> Olivia Dorsey: Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Dr. Foreman. Thank you, Janet, for your responses. I'm going to take a moment to pause and see if we have any questions from our in-person audience or from our virtual audience. [ Inaudible ] >> And they wanted to know what was going on down this hallway. And I said is it top secret? And then they said well are you a guide? I said yeah, I guess so. I said but it's about digital collecting and doing all this stuff. I said come on down. And then I gave them this, and they were like wow. And then they looked at the program and all the people. And so two young African American men, guys, teenagers really, were just like oh, September 30th. That's the application. But just to know, just being able to have this here at this time, I just have to thank you again. I'm not going to cry. But I'm going to thank you again. Just wanted to tell you that. [ Applause ] >> Olivia Dorsey: Any questions? Okay. No questions, so we'll go ahead and move on to the next portion of our panel. Elizabeth Mendez Berry offered a set of values that she'd like to see guide the efforts through each newly envisioned Library of Congress in 2030. These values include accessibility, transparency, truth, imagination, hospitality, communication and organizing. I can see threads of this, threads of many of those values in a lot of your past work and in your essays. My next question is for Jennifer. You've talked about ways of understanding access and accessibility. Would you mind talking a little bit more about that here? >> Jennifer Ferretti: There we go. It didn't sound right to me, so thank you. Is access to information and information ethics, so that is concerned with who has the right to what information and how. Also access to digital technologies. I mean it's great to talk about digitization and what's online, but certain populations don't have access to phones. As we talked about at lunch, you know, public libraries giving out hotspots is great, but if you don't have a device that connects you to the internet, you know, you don't really have a use for those hotspots. And then access to the profession, which is something that I'm deeply concerned with. As somebody who never wanted to be a librarian because I didn't know what librarians did. I didn't understand what it was that a library and information science worker actually did at a library. And I think a lot of people don't. And as somebody who's in the profession, I now make it my business to make sure I tell people what it is we do and we don't just sit around and read. So that and, you know, underneath all of the access issues, I think is the false idea of neutrality and the idea there's a neutral robot making all of these decisions in the library from subject headings to collection development to, you know, what's even being digitized. So I think that all of those issues are things that we could explore in thinking about what we're designing. So designing the programming, designing what we're collecting, how we're reaching out to people. And really designing it from thinking about marginalized communities at the center. [ Applause ] >> Olivia Dorsey: And Dr. Brock, you've also talked about accessibility. And in particular, for your paper, could you talk a little bit more about the vision that you were describing in your concept paper about accessibility? >> Dr. Andre Brock: Absolutely. Oh, that works. Before I do, though, I want to just follow up on Jennifer's point. So there are many, not as many as I would like, Brown folk who have passed through and completed the master's in library and information science. But there's still a pipeline problem, right. So I can say confidently that I am the second Black man to get a Ph.D. in library science from the University of Illinois which has been in service since 1898 or so right. And so there are many of us who, the Ph.D. is not the most important part of the library science, I would add, but I will say that if you think about it from that perspective, there's still a lack of access that we have. Many of the folk I know who got Ph.D.'s of color are no longer in the profession. And that's something to think about, right. So your question, I can briefly describe myself as a person who is a researcher of Black digital life, right. And it's always interesting to me because I came up on digital divide research which said that Black folk lacked material, financial or technical literacies to access the digital. But what I found across these last 15 years of work is that Black people are acutely aware of their information needs and behaviors, particularly when it comes to online stuff, right. And so in that vein I see myself in my current work right now as almost a curator and an archivist of one of the largest living archives of Black life right now which is Twitter, right. And Twitter I argue is not a community properly understood. I argue for it is as a collective. It's made of multiple communities. And one of the things I was thinking about when I wrote my two-pager for the Library is how to gain access and store and preserve the things that this collective of Black folk bring up on an everyday basis on this particular archive. Not simply the trauma moments that happen around Jayland, the young man who got killed in Akron or George Floyd or Trayvon but also the moments of hilarity and laughter that are also. So I could say meet me in Temecula, and those people who have been on Twitter since 2013 would know what I'm talking about. If I even go back to last week and a Tiny Desk concert that was held here at NPR and I start going like this, every Black person in the audience knows what I'm talking about, right. But those things do not necessarily circulate into the larger conversation. So my wish for the Library in 2030 is that the Library take on some steps that Zora Neale Hurston did with Eatonville, right. Chronicle Black life not only in its trauma but also in its pleasures, its catharsis and the like in a way that remains accessible in the way that it was presented to us and the way we participated in it, right, for future generations. Because one of the biggest outcries, going back to Black people information needs, on social media right now is we losing recipes, right. And some of that is about, you know, young men not knowing how to fix cars and young women not knowing how to make gumbo. That's completely irrelevant, right. But more of it is we're losing some of the cultural knowledges and things that our folks brought up with us from the South to the North or kept in the South or took out West. And I feel like Twitter is a repository for many of those things that are brought up in mundane situations, and the Library would do well to try to capture some of that. [ Applause ] >> Olivia Dorsey: Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Brock. Last but not least, I have a question for Bari. Elizabeth also talked explicitly about communication and hospitality as values. Do you mind speaking to the importance of connecting communities with information and methods of making that information more accessible to them. >> Bari Talley: I think particularly, is this working, okay. During COVID it was super important for people to be able to communicate and not in person. And also specifically students and the education community. So I think that it's super important for people to be able to connect with collections. And also, it's important for their sense of belonging. And I think it's important for people to connect to place and time and all of those things that are available through those collections. And that's it. >> Olivia Dorsey: Thank you. [ Applause ] Thank you, Brian, Dr. Brock and Bari for your responses. I'll take this time to pause and see if we have any virtual questions or in-person questions from our audience. >> Camille Dantzler: Thank you so much, panelists, for speaking. This is really refreshing to be in the space and to have this kind of dialogue. So just thank you for that. My name is Camille, and I am a junior fellow within the CCDI initiative. And so I'm super excited to be able to meet everyone in person. Rather than a question, I guess, with relation to what has been said, I'm interested in hearing your perspectives on gatekeeping and trust. Because I think a lot of what we discuss in terms of spatial justice, accessibility, trust and gatekeeping pipelines are of particular relevance in terms of thinking about ways to disrupt it and also thinking about ways that it's continued in these spaces. And so I'm just very interested in your responses to that within the legacy of the Library of Congress. >> Dr. Andre Brock: I feel like that's a question for Bari. >> Bari Talley: Well, for us, we have specific rules and ways of providing information that aren't necessarily Western. It's like some things are just meant for cultural people and some things are meant only for men. Some stories are meant only to be told when there's snow on the mountain. So there, we use a platform, Mukadoo [phonetic] platform that allows us to provide different levels of access depending on what our cultural protocols are. And so that's what we're using to do the gatekeeping and whatnot. And we're also, you know, it is people. And so when I get a request for membership or into our digital repository, I usually Google the person and find out just because like I don't want people to use things for commercial purposes. And I want to know kind of what their, why they're searching and what they're looking for and find out a little bit more about the person. And so I guess that's another way of gatekeeping. >> Olivia Dorsey: Anyone else from the panel would like to respond? >> Jennifer Ferretti: I'll just say quickly about gatekeeping in the profession. So I had mentioned access to the profession, and I think, you know, that legacy of racial discrimination and physical buildings and the profession, you know, that has to have an effect on the dismal demographics on the profession now. And I think one of those, one of the ways that that continues today's, you know, obviously, well, I'll just leave that. The one of the ways that continues today is to require free labor, for example, and unpaid internships to put on your resume. You know, exponentially expensive master's programs and, you know, this separation between the degreed workforce and the not degreed workforce. So and I think that at least, you know, through we here and the work that I do there, you know, people are just not trying to hear that anymore. They're really working to change that gatekeeping so that they can provide access to other folks that come into the profession. >> Dr. Gabrielle Foreman: I want to double down on that, what Jennifer just said about the distribution of wealth turning into the distribution of knowledge, production and a real sensibility around questions of trust. And not just labor but the ways in which we carry both debt and knowledge, right. And can we think about carrying debt and the interest on debt, right, and the interest on knowledge, right, as well as in knowledge production. So how do you create knowledge producers who then have to go through these gatekeeping accreditation, right, sensibilities to get Ph.D.s, right, or to get MLISs. And then also to move to places to D.C., right. So the fact that we have built so many professions based on an economic system which invisibly suggests only those with wealth can literally move and have to carry the moving costs, right. So, you know, the ways in which we advocate for pipeline building needs to be both accountable to the communities, the nation that we want to create. But also accountable to the nation we've inherited, right. And that the people who we are inviting now to be part of a family they've always been part of, right, don't need to be the people who are carrying all the luggage, all the debt and then paying for the privilege of then expanding the knowledge base, the archive base, the collection base, without anybody else picking up that luggage. This is Frederick Douglass, right. Anna Murray and I both picked up the luggage, and then we went on our way, right. So that metaphor, we all need to pick up our luggage. We all need to pick up our baggage, right. And that means creating systems moving forward in our strategic planning, in our protocols, in our processes. This gets back to this question of trust, right. That allows us to actually see reality. And part of that reality is the Black people in this country now, right, the differential in wealth, is 8 to 10 times, right. And if that is so, asking somebody to pay for their moving costs to a library internship, all right, or not be paid, means something very different because the interest accrues, literally, on the credit cards that they put it on, right. And so we need to think about those kinds of differentials. And that also get us to those accountability ethics, right. And those have to be public facing. So how do we create ethics as an institution, the Library of Congress. This new project has this set of principles. This set of principles has been based on collaborations with these sets of people. And then they're public facing. And then it allows us to actually be accountable to ourselves in our processes. I don't trust myself. Do you trust yourself in every, right, circumstance? I don't. I might be able to go to the principals, right, which also allows me to justify it to people who have power, right, or other communities and explain it in ways that always hold me accountable to a broader collective, right, of decision making. So I think that kind of question, and this was one of ours, it wasn't me. It was one of ours was talking really about what are the public ethics of accountability that we put in public facing documents in order to hold CCDI, right. And that's an opportunity and an invitation to We the People, right. That's not an obligation or a challenge, right. It really is an invitation for us to come together to do that work collectively. >> Oliva Dorsey: Absolutely. [ Applause ] >> Brian Carpenter: I can say a brief thing about trust thing in terms of how organizations or institutions try to communicate that. Like I think about it this way. If I said to someone strawberry ice cream is my favorite ice cream. Or rhododendrons are my favorite flower. It wouldn't make sense for someone to say, no it isn't. You know, that's something that, but if I say I'm trustworthy, that is something that they decide That's not what I say. So for institutions or organizations, it's the same way. Institutions can make the mistake of saying hey, we're trustworthy, we're reliable, we're honest. The thing to do is to act in a trustworthy manner that you believe to be trustworthy and say we are acting in this way because these are values that are important to us. But then fundamentally, it's your constituency, the people you're trying to work with, who tell you whether you are. And that's where the accountability comes in and checking in saying, and if they say no, it's still not working, then what do you do. >> Thank you. >> Olivia Dorsey: Absolutely. [ Applause ] >> Olivia Dorsey: We have one more question, I think. Yeah. >> I just wanted to thank the panel for this conversation. As a recent graduate of MLIS, these are the sort of conversations that I'm so passionate about, and I don't always them in library spaces. But I think that there's like a sense of urgency to them. Something that was brought up that I'm personally very passionate about is the concept of neutrality and like abolishing neutrality in librarianship. An I notice that sometimes, there's like different reactions that come with it, like sometimes it's like treated as this sort of impossible metaphor. Other times it's seen as like an existential threat, which I find itself to be very telling. I wonder what it would look like if you reframed it as an act of love of like radical love and radical honesty to the communities that we say we serve. And so just like an open question I wonder like what would it mean to abolish or move away from neutrality? What would it look like? And sort of what are the mechanisms that we could potentially move in that direction. >> Dr. Andre Brock: Sorry. I'm hung up on my earring. So I have a two-headed answer to this question. The first one is citing my guy, Victor Ray. Victor Ray writes about racialized organizations. And he argues that many institutions in the United States, corporate, nonprofit, educational, do not necessarily understand that they are themselves racialized. That they operate according to unspoken principles about who gets to have the resources, who has access to certain things and who does not, right. And so the first step for many library schools is that they need to interrogate the belief structure that they sprang from which is in itself about a system of privilege about who can be librarians, right. To then ask themselves, why are they not getting the candidates of color that they would like to have. But crucially, why are they not teaching the students that they have principles or social justice? Or why is it like one week in a course, right? And so understanding the position that libraries themselves hold, library schools themselves hold and the libraries that they then send people out is crucial to I think establishing a standpoint, right. And that standpoint is super important to me. It illustrates a lot of my current work because I argue that if you don't understand where you're coming from, you never know where you're going. So what does it mean then for the Library of Congress which was founded in part by the Constitution, if I'm correct, right, to be also part of a document that codified the bodies of Black folk as 3/5 of a person, right? At what point do you then have to separate yourself, to disambiguate yourself in order to understand that you are still upholding the institutions that founded this nation, which were themselves flawed. Women couldn't be citizens or voting. Black folk weren't even considered. They genocided indigenous folk. They brought other people in from lands. How do you then continue to be an institution which only values the contributions of those folk when they're fighting against White supremacy? Right. And so this also feeds back into the work that I do as well. I argue that to understand any technology, including information in libraries, you need to understand what the artifact is, what the practices around that artifact is and the beliefs that empower it, right. So what beliefs power our understanding of what information is or what a library is, right. And so this is a slightly different perspective than Victors, right. But I argue that to understand the use of any technology, including the texts that we have here, multimedia, print or otherwise, we also need to understand the context in which they're deployed and understand who they're deployed for. So why do you have narratives of indigenous trauma, of Latinx erasure, right, from census documents. Of Black folk as former slaves contributing to the Public Works Project, right. Where are the other celebrations? Like what is the origin of the rhymes that power Double Dutch, right? Why must we consider the failure of the United States to repeatedly honor treaties for sovereign indigenous nations? That stuff needs to be in the archive as well, right. And so until we get to that point, that radical, it shouldn't even be radical, right. But one of the things that I've learned is that a lot of people are not reflective on who they are, and that definitely feeds back into institutions. It is radical to be reflexive and have interiority about what your position is, vis-a-vis the position you're presenting to the world. Libraries could do a lot of soul searching to get past the idea that these folk up here are outreach. And instead, we are integral parts of this tapestry, I hate to use that word, that's the United States, right. And need to be integrated from the jump as opposed to a later step. [ Applause ] >> Carla Hayden: The history of the Library of Congress, and this is really helpful as the Library of Congress moves forward, is more complicated. It was started with 600 books, law books, in the capital. 1802 the clerk of the Senate became the first Librarian of Congress, so 800, you got that. Then the British burned, used books, some of those books, to burn the Capitol. And they purchased, and he had an option of his wine collection or his books, Thomas Jefferson in Monticello had retired. And he sold what was then 6,000 books, you see it's there, that very eclectic. He had a Quran. He had books in other languages, everything. The largest personal library and in 1814. So this Library is really founded on Thomas Jefferson's library that was in Monticello. I was really going to say something here about. But if you see where it was, okay, you know. You know where the library was. So then you have this library that he says there's no subject to which a member of Congress should not have occasion to refer. So they fought about this collection then. And then it grew and then in 1870 copyright became part of the Library of Congress. And that's when a lot of the deposit things. But also during that time, you have the gatekeepers. You have the people that are saying it's folklife, not life. The slave narratives complicated about how you got the information. And who was doing the interviewing. There's a whole there, so to be able to be honest and talk about it and talk about what the world's largest library is, what it contains and who's working in, who's making decisions, paid internships, Ms. Powell, was a big part. Paid internships, to delve into it. So that you are producing, hopefully, people who would work here and be sensitive. A young lady, one of the librarians, young librarian, was so taken with the fact that we just acquired, and she was part of this acquisition, the collection of the woman who designed the logo for the Migrant Worker's Labor thing, and it meant so much to her. She teared up because she said now, this is something in this library that relates to me. So, thank you again. I promise I'm going to stop talking. But this means so much to have it, to have it, to have it heard. And one of the paid internships, and Kimberly Powell knows what happened. At one of the presentations when we first started with Howard University. And the students were making their presentations. And some staff members, you know, they were paired with staff members. And the lady didn't, I don't think she realized what she was saying after she was giving a, let's call him Jamal, who was a Ph.D. student, all this stuff. He's doing all this stuff. And she said you know, this has been wonderful for me and my colleagues because now when we're on an interview panel, and someone like Jamal comes in, we're going to think about, look at Kimberly, right, comes in we're going to remember the good experience we had with him. And we looked at each other. But we had to step back and say okay, okay, this is what. So institutional, the spaces, people are upset a little bit about making this building accessible. Having a welcome area. Introducing people to what it is. And they're like oh, you can't touch this. You can't put a hole in the reading room. You can't do that. Well, that thing hasn't been used since 1940, the dumbwaiter, okay. Why can't you do it. So thank you. Talking about space. Talking about subject headings. Talking about all of these things, the profession, bringing people in and saying look, this Library is for everyone. [ Applause ] >> Olivia Dorsey: Thank you, Dr. Hayden. And thank you to the advisory board as well for your time and for this lovely conversation. It was fantastic. Oh, a question. We have another question. >> A question from Abigail. With regard to the amazing ideas and critiques from the advisors, in addition to supporting grantee projects, is there also an explicit goal to document gaps in the collection, types of use that aren't yet supported and other barriers they encounter? If so, how. And is there also a commitment to collections and access work based on those findings? To anyone on the panel. >> Carla Hayden: Yes. There is a commitment to that. This is not just a one off or thing. This is giving us, she keeps saying put it up there. This is not a one off. This is giving us the foundation, the research, the proof of concept, whatever you want to call it, to have things institutionalized and to move forward. So there is a commitment to make sure that this continues. And is part of what the Library of Congress does. So and this is taped or will be out on the Twitter sphere. Though I do want to find out what that means. I think I'm the only person that didn't know what that meant. >> Olivia Dorsey: Wonderful. All right. Thank you, again, Dr. Hayden. Thank you, again, advisory board for your time with us today. For the wonderful conversation. At this time, we'll go ahead and conclude. I would also like to thank our audience, in-person audience as well as our virtual audience for joining us today and celebrating our grantees, our advisory board. And we also have our junior fellows in the house as well, so. [ Applause ] >> Should the junior fellows introduce themselves? >> Brian Carpenter: Yes, and the interns. The paid interns. >> Olivia Dorsey: Okay. >> Camille Dantzler: Hi, my name is Camille Dantzler, and I'm a recent graduate of Howard University. I just got my Ph.D. in African studies. And I'm so excited to hear, and I think a lot of the conversation is a part of the reason why I applied to be a junior fellow. I'm going to go ahead and sit down. My project this summer is called By the Root, and it's looking at Black labor ecologies coming from the Dantzler Plantation. So it's partly autobiographic. And I'm looking at the evolutions of that. They owned lumber companies later in Mississippi, so it's specifically spotlighting the Civil War up through World War II and what those ecologies look like in terms of labor. Yeah. That's where I'm at. >> Dr. Andre Brock: I know, the earrings, right. >> Hi. I'm Gizelle Gazi [assumed spelling]. I recently graduated from the University of Oklahoma. My project is focused on the Persian language materials collection. And, you know, I'm looking through Persian calligraphy, poetry and miniature paintings and exploring the different kinds of love that manifest and how, you know, poets and artists have been in conversation with each other. So I'm really excited to be here and thank you all. [ Applause ] >> Meagan: Hi, my name is Meagan. I'm in the Higher Education Project for junior fellow's program, and I'm looking at the Japanese American internment camp newspaper collection and focusing on the student relocation policy which allowed people incarcerated in the incarceration centers to leave in order to attend university or colleges. And then talking about the different communities of support that focused on helping Japanese American students at the time and how we can look at those to recreate community support as well and higher education. [ Applause ] >> Hello, my name is [inaudible]. I am currently working on a project that depicts the Mexican population in San Antonio, Texas, and thank you so much for your presentations. [ Applause ] >> Olivia Dorsey: Thank you to our junior fellows. At this time, I'll conclude the afternoon portion of our program. And I'll let Marya McQuirter, program director of CCDI, close with some closing remarks. [ Applause ] >> Marya McQuirter: All right. Good afternoon, everybody. I feel like Dr. Hayden. I'm over there just like trying to fight back tears just because this has been so incredibly loving, so generous, a combination of just people coming together, Erika, Olivia, Lori, who's offstage. Just, you know, pulling this together and making it happen as well as folks in labs and DSD and just Library-wide that have just made this happen. So I'm just incredibly happy and excited. And again, just want to thank everybody for coming. And you know, CCDI, this is just the beginning for us. More to come. So please stay tuned on our website and on the blog. Thank you again so much. [ Applause ]