A potential benefit of digitizing zines is increasing their accessibility. While a physical copy of Mirha-Soleil Ross’ gendertrash from hell might be hard to come by for many people in 2017, putting a high quality scan of the zine online makes it accessible to anyone with an internet connection, right? Not really. Depending on the context, “access” can take on very different meanings. I think we should think critically about what it means to make […]
Over the first two years of the Collaboratory project, we have devoted a lot of energy to setting up technical infrastructure for doing digitization here at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, where our work is based. This has meant finding and servicing good used equipment that will play the “obsolete” media formats that make up the collections, like audio cassette and VHS tapes. Any digitization system begins by assembling what’s called a “Rack.” Here’s a […]
The Lesbians Making History (LMH) Digital Collection is now available online through the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives new digital collections site. Streaming audio, full transcripts, and some images have been added to the collection and we will continue to build on this over the coming months. This is the last stage in the Collaboratory’s ongoing work to digitize and make available the Lesbians Making History tapes, an important record of mid-20th century lesbian life in Canada. […]
Congratulations to Collaboratory member (and new Executive Director of the CLGA!) Rebecka Sheffield, for her award-winning poster on the LGBTQ Collaboratory. Rebecka’s poster was presented at the 2015 Archival Education Research Institute (AERI). Held at the University of Maryland, AERI brought together Archival Studies scholars from all around the world. Rebecka’s poster-an at once gorgeous and concise summary of the Collaboratory’s work-won the audience award, beating out a total of 26 other research posters presented […]
The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory is gearing up for an exciting visit this coming week (May 25-28) with Collaborator Dr. KJ Rawson, Assistant Professor in the English department at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Rawson is developing the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA), a sophisticated website that will bring together trans archival materials from various collections around the world (http://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.org/). Many such materials are currently spread out across research collections and […]
This month the LGBTQ Collaboratory held our first audio digitization workshop, where potential volunteers were trained on the use of our new audio digitization station. This station allows us to create preservation quality .wav files from cassette tapes as well as noise-reduced, streaming ready versions that will eventually be made available to researchers through the online interface we’re currently developing. Al Stanton-Hagan, Cait McKinney, and Nicholas Matte lead the workshop for an enthusiastic group of […]