Report: “Challenge of Archiving the #MeToo Movement”
From Harvard Gazette:
For decades, Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library has been the nation’s leading repository for a range of primary-source materials documenting the lives and legacies of women in America. Its collections are crammed with letters and posters, journals and photographs — the physical records of an individual, a family, a social action, a political campaign.
Today, newer collections often arrive with hard disks and thumb drives; “papers” now include emails. But until recently, social media had not figured largely. Then came a cultural moment that shook the nation and helped transform the way the library collects and curates material in a communications age when hashtags can muster millions and tweets are commentary, conversation, and official declaration.
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“The discussions of how we would be accountable for collecting this movement began almost immediately because of our long history of collecting materials that document gender and labor organizing,” said Jane Kamensky, the Schlesinger’s Pforzheimer Foundation Director and Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History.
But the librarians were confronted with the novel question of how to gather and preserve material related to a movement that was born and partly still exists in a virtual world. Their answer: Gather websites, tweets, online articles, and other electronic material related to the topic in a publicly accessible digital archive.
“There was no clear individual to whom we could reach out to acquire the #MeToo collection, so we knew we would have to work differently to document the movement, and that we were really going to have to create the collection.
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About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.