 Kia ora koutou, ko Valerie Love Aho, no Amerika Aho, i Mahiyama Aho, ki te puna Matarangou Ahteroa. Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou, koutoua. So thank you all very much for coming. My name is Valerie Love, I'm sure my accent has already given me away, but I'm a transplant to New Zealand from the United States. And I'm currently working at the Alexander Turnbull Library at the National Library of New Zealand. And my colleague, Kirsty Cox, is in the next room giving a talk about all the really exciting work that we're doing with born digital materials over there. But thank you all for being over here in this session. I'm going to talk to you today about some of the work that I did with digital human rights materials in the United States before I moved to Wellington. And I'm also going to offer you some lessons learned and four principles for working with digital human rights materials more generally, which I hope will be of use. So from 2007 to 2011, I worked as the curator for human rights collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut in the United States. The role was a new position at the university to provide library and archival support to the Human Rights Institute, which had a prestigious research and teaching program at the university. And I was also tasked with building the archival collections and the library collections on human rights materials to support the Human Rights Institute. At the time I began the position, there was quite a lot of hand-wringing in the archival community in the United States about the issue of working with born digital collection materials. The idea of providing long-term access and preservation in perpetuity was terrifying for a lot of institutions. And there was a lot of conversation about how do we do this, how do we make sure these materials are accessible and preserved. And at the time that I was working at the University of Connecticut, we were still working to develop our policies for preserving born digital collection items. But as you might imagine, the records of contemporary activism and human rights advocacy are almost entirely born digital or at the very least higher collections. And so these collections really became some test cases for working and developing these policies for born digital collections. And that means that some lessons were learned along the way. So one of the first collections that I accessioned into the Human Rights Collection brought the difficulties of working with human rights materials into relief. It was a collection of 218 digital photographs of contemporary child labor and slavery from around the world, including some images taken in the agricultural industry in the United States. The photographs went along with the documentary film, Stolen Childhoods, that was released in 2005. And the donor had made all the materials open access and was really eager for them to be used in the human rights curriculum at the University and to be made available online as an advocacy tool. And the faculty as well were very eager to use these materials and develop teaching plans for their courses about this collection. But there were some issues. First of all, the images were of children so I had to make sure it was okay to make them available on the University Library's website in the first place. And then secondly, the metadata for the photographs was an issue. So some images had no information at all and the image you've just seen in the previous slide had all of this text and more embedded into it. And it provided detailed caption and background information about general working conditions in the industry for that particular photograph. But then other photographs had very generic metadata that appeared in multiple photographs that had been taken in the same location. And then other images had embedded metadata that was very scant but dealt with that specific image. There was one image in the collection of a 15-year-old girl where the embedded metadata had her full name and explained that she had suffered repeated rape and abuse from her employer and his brothers before being rescued and reunited with her family by an anti-human trafficking agency. So that brings us to principle one of working with digital human rights materials. Do No Harm. So this principle comes from a book by Mary D. Anderson entitled Do No Harm How Aid Can Support Peace or War. And although I'm sure that she didn't expect it to be applied to archivists and librarians I actually think it's a really important point for the glam sector to consider as well. The purpose of the collection and making the images open access was to raise awareness and to create an emotional response between the image and the viewer that would ideally lead to a call for action and for those of us in western nations to stop consuming products and supporting industries where child abuse and labor is the norm. But I personally felt that including such personal and sensitive information on the website hosted on the other side of the world would be committing a second violation. The girl in the photograph had no control over this image and I didn't want to make that available in the event that somebody from her country, somebody that knew her would stumble upon this image and this very sensitive information was embedded into it. So as an archivist I didn't want to remove or censor that metadata but at the same time I also really wanted to respect her privacy and her experience. So again it was probably pretty unlikely that somebody would come across the image but you also don't know. But at the same time if I didn't include the image in the collection again an image that the photographer had provided to us with open access to raise awareness was like sanitizing the truth and creating further silence on a topic where so few are willing or able to speak out in the first place. These were really not easy questions to answer. So in February 2010 the director of the Human Rights Institute sat me down and informed me that Mia Farrow had been in touch regarding her humanitarian work on Sudan and Darfur. Now Mia Farrow has had an illustrious career in television and film. She's appeared in over 50 films and in September 2000 was appointed a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador promoting children's rights. She's really made it her life's mission to raise awareness and try to stop the genocide in Darfur and the violence that has spread to neighboring countries such as Chad, the Central African Republic and South Sudan. Now according to the UN High Commission for Refugees there are approximately 4.5 million internally displaced people in Sudan and hundreds of thousands more in camps in neighboring countries. Mia has traveled to the region over 15 times in the past decade in addition to her UNICEF work in other parts of the world such as Haiti and Uganda and she's really been speaking out for the people of Darfur. She's done everything from writing newspaper articles and giving speeches to even undertaking a hunger strike in 2009 in order to draw awareness to the violence and horrors that unfortunately still continue to this day. And because of her tiredness dedication and the fact that she's ever advocating and keeps going back to the camps year after year the Darfur people absolutely love her and they really trust her to share their stories in the hopes that the international community will finally take notice and listen. During her visits to the refugee camps Mia realized that the cultural heritage of the Darfur people was in real danger of disappearing. And this actually when in Penny's opening remarks she kind of alluded to this as well in reference to the Christchurch Earthquakes that when you're in the middle of something so frightening the last thing you do is to document it. That really resonated with me and made me think of this project as well. So Mia began really trying to record and document the cultural heritage and the traditions of the Darfur Zagala and Nazali peoples. And rather than attempt to describe this myself because this all predates my involvement with the project I'm going to play the first few minutes of a video that Mia made and that's going to give you some information about her work. And there should be sound. It's very faint. Not saying at all. Actually maybe... Let me see if I can get to it on the line where I might be able to control the quality of the feather. I must actually. Who was working this morning? The archives are going to document the great cultural traditions and oral history of those Darfur-y tribes talking like a government. 2003, a Sudanese president took a memorial this year and it's revolving. This is gathered across Darfur and the history of the Chad. Today, 80 to 90% of Darfur's villages are ashes or occupied by others. They are exiled through the Chad from just 19 years old. In one refugee camp in Bunda a tribal leader explained you know us very well. You know we are in mourning. We are suffering. We do not do these celebrations in the camps. I made it clear that I understand that they are suffering and that this project is born of my deepest respect for them. I know something of the atrocities they have endured and the injustices and deprivations they continue to face each day. I also respect what was once theirs for traditions that were inseparable from their identity which marked the most important passages in their lives and within their lost communities. The archives must exist for the children who have grown up in deplorable camps and immense violence and this for them and for the children of Darfur will otherwise never know their own heritage. The only life in the camps will not know the agriculture. To the refugees that planned one day peace comes there will be a museum in Murlau Darfur a place where young people can go to reclaim what is theirs. It doesn't take a spot at the edge of the camp every day for a month. I will suddenly operate the camera. They could decide what should be preserved. It's for them for the children of generations to come to treasures. Some 35 hours of songs, dances, celebrations of coming of age, marriage, planting, harvesting. The elders share their memories and the stories told to them by their grandparents. We have gone back with only a hundred years. My apologies that that video was so faint but it is online and it's actually a 9 minute video in total and please feel free to watch it the link is down there and also if you just google Darfur Archives video it should come up as well. So I'm not sure if you totally heard all of that but just really briefly so Mia was able to film 35 hours of video of cultural traditions in the camps. She also photographed artifacts that were significant to the people of Darfur and it was really a project that she didn't know that it was going to be successful. She said that I'll sit over here in this corner of the camp and if you want to be on film come and if you don't, no worries and thousands of people came and they really took over the project as their own which of course it was. So yeah, so that's the real quick overview. In order to raise awareness of the plight of Darfur refugees Mia began an advocacy blog and the link to that was just MiaFaro.org it's pretty easy to remember and she also set up a flicker photo stream with photographs from her travels as well as the images of the artifacts that people had brought to her and that brings me to our second principle and that is don't go at it alone. So get collaborators on board. It always makes your projects better and it keeps you from feeling quite as overwhelmed as well. So for the video that we just saw Mia worked with documentary filmmaker Brad Comfort and this principle of gathering collaborators is why she contacted the university at the Human Rights Institute in the first place and then she and I got in contact with Bridget Conley-Zilkick at the National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and the advice and the insight that she provided was really, really invaluable so it was really important to get other collaborators on board and talk to people about the project as we were doing it just to make sure that we were on the right track and again following that principle that first principle of do no harm. So in addition to the artifacts in chat and you can see she's got an entire flicker set just devoted to those artifacts that have all been numbered in the collection and she also had digital photographs video footage about 35 hours of video footage her own diaries and journals from her trips to the region as well as speeches and drafts of speeches lectures that she'd given drafts and final versions of her opinion pieces and writings for newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and a host of emails between her and other human rights scholars and advocates now while the university wasn't in a position to really provide assistance with the cultural artifacts which are still in chat we were able to provide a home for the born digital and the printed items that she created as a result of her humanitarian work and so in June 2010 I took a drive to Bridgewater, Connecticut which is a picturesque small town near the border with New York State and I met Nia at her house I was greeted with two large poodles that immediately became my best friends and although I was ready to immediately get down to work Nia insisted that food comes before business and she chopped vegetables and cooked pasta and I sat at her kitchen table being completely astounded that a famous actor was making lunch for me and I was a little bit not sure of what to do with myself this is actually a photo of two of us up in her attic so you can see that the desk and the computer are actually behind us so you can't see them but there were some pieces of furniture some drawers and dressers that were just full of documents full of e-mail printouts full of other materials and then she's got her big map of dartboard on the wall behind her so once the mail was finished we headed to the upstairs attic office that you've just seen and got to work she again had drawers of materials and printouts of materials from her son Ronan who is one of her collaborators that she's written many of her pieces with she also donated to us journals and moleskate notebooks from her travels drawings of children from the camps had made for her and other itineraries and travel documents from UNICEF in total there were six boxes of papers and other printed materials one box of CDs and DVDs as well had dealt with the physical items and boxed those up and got them ready for transfer to the archives Mia turned on her iMac and sat me down in front of it and she told me that there was something that she wanted me to watch I assumed that it would be a video about dartboard but instead Mia went to a YouTube video of Katie Land singing a cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah and she told me it was one of her all time favorites and she wanted me to watch it and so that brings me to principle number three human rights materials and this is one of the stories that one of the women told to her and she said that she's heard variations on this story countless times that so many of them have experienced exactly what's up here so principle number three is take breaks this may seem completely obvious it may even seem trite but the fact is it's actually really important you know we had a little bit of a palette cleanser that we were going to be laying for a few minutes and then we were able to kind of get back to work and continue dealing with a really difficult subject matter but this whole concept of taking breaks is really hard for people who do work in Humanitarian Advocacy to do I've also noticed it's a really hard thing for IT people to do because there's this sense that the work you're doing is really important and believe me it is it's so important the work that Humanitarians do but you also do have to take breaks and take care of yourself as part of the process so Mia's writings and speeches were all neatly organized in folders on her computer they were easy to identify and so we copied all of those Microsoft Word files relating to Dart Forward Sudan onto a USB drive that I brought for for that purpose and then she opened her iPhoto library and I realized that I should have brought affordable hard drive not just a USB stick at the time only I think had like 4 GB of iPhone and I mean it wasn't even that big of a USB stick and I also brought a handful of gold CDs but Mia had thousands of photographs from Chad's to Dan's, Central African Republic Democratic Republic of the Congo Uganda, Haiti, all of these places that she'd done Humanitarian work her photos were arranged by trip and location for the most part but there were some iPhoto albums that weren't labeled and then there were also albums that she created when she was giving a talk somewhere and wanted a general overview from various places so there were duplicates it was a little overwhelming actually so Mia offered me suggestions for which photos to include in the collection and of course then began telling stories about some of them which was great except that I really had to scramble to keep up so all of the files were actually from her Mac and so a lot of them didn't include file extensions which caused issues when I tried to work with them back in my office on my PC and unfortunately when I transferred the files and added file extensions some of them maintained their original metadata and original creation dates and others that came forever more 30 June 2010 so that falls into the lessons learn category also I thought that five hours of the house with her would be plenty of time and it turned out to be not nearly enough Mia had to leave for an appointment towards the end of the afternoon and I was sent away with what I'd been able to acquire in that time period which was all the Microsoft Word files that she flagged for the collection but really only a fraction of the digital photography although we did later get a bit we did get all of the digital video as well in a combination of disk and hard drive so since most of her digital photography didn't have any metadata I had been trying to record dates and other contextual information as we went along but when I got back to my office and began to work with the files I realized just how much information I hadn't been able to record at the time so in retrospect a digital recorder and probably also a member of our IT team with me would have been a really good idea so I hope to come back relatively soon to continue getting collection materials from her but I also wanted to continue conversations to better understand the materials that I did have unfortunately what we kept in regular email contact, Mia was pretty soon on a plane to the other side of the world and gone again almost as soon as she returned back to Connecticut so this did give me time however to begin processing what I already had and try to make sense of them as best as I could on my own the print materials were easily described and arranged and put in hassle free folders and boxes for digital photographs we were able to add to the library's content management system, content DM but the other digital files that weren't photographs were a bit trickier so I mentioned Mia Farrell's blog because we were unable to ingest or archive her advocacy blog as a digital object I printed out each blog post between 2007 and 2010 and I folded them up and I put them in boxes and it seems absolutely archaic and crazy in retrospect particularly now that I'm at the National Library of New Zealand and they've been doing web harvesting since 1999 so it's been embarrassing in retrospect and it actually really is a shame that we didn't have that capacity at the university to harvest the blog as a digital object because somewhere between April and May 2012 she restructured her blog so it no longer looks like this at all she turned it into more of a static website that basically redirects visitors to her Twitter and her Facebook accounts to get news and updates that way and this is just the second part of that same blog post so currently her website still includes her published editorials but the more colloquial blog posts like the one up on the screen that's no longer visible and this screencap I actually got from the internet archives their way back machine and it has some of the content but unfortunately not all of it it was kind of patchy what was still visible through the internet archiving what wasn't and it's really unfortunate because I think these posts actually show a side of her and also share anecdotes from the camps that don't appear in other writings so I think they do contain a lot of really really relevant information so it had been me's vision to develop an online documentation center on Sudan and Darfur and that became my focus in the coming months the website that you're seeing here was launched in June 2011 sudan.ucom.edu it's a really simple site design it was following the university's template so I didn't really have a lot of flexibility with design but basically it provides a gateway to information about various collections that we had in the archives also linked to other collections that were relevant at other institutions, background information and it's also a lot of people we were able to contact other scholars, other activists and get them to become part of this project and donate their materials as well so we have a photo essay by Eric Reeves he eventually donated his papers just as well and he's probably one of the most prolific researchers on Sudan he's just written he's again devoted his entire life to advocacy for Sudan and raising awareness of what's going on and the site also includes resources for students because again we're at a university and a lot of this was to support the teaching and research programs there so just before the site was to be launched schedule's aligned and almost exactly a year after our first meeting I went back to Mia's house with a colleague from the Human Rights Institute and we conducted an oral history with Mia to to really learn more about her time actually in the refugee camps because that's such a unique experience I conducted the oral history using both the digital voice I'm sorry, a digital video recorder as well as a backup cassette recorder and I transcribed 50 pages of interview in record time spending long hours at the office in my final week on the job because I wanted to make sure the project was finished before I left for New Zealand and that brings us to the final principle in working with Human Rights Materials and that is to use your voice so again the site launched literally in my final week on the job and then a few weeks later I moved to New Zealand and I spent a while back at principle 3 in all honesty which was of course take a break I was really exhausted and the emotional toll of working with exclusively with Human Rights content over the past 5 years and really really had gotten to me I didn't realize how much of a job I would take home each night I didn't realize how much the images and the stories and all histories would really stick with me and haunt me but that's actually exactly why I'm speaking to you today I'm going to conclude with an excerpt I wrote about work that I did in Rwanda about a year before I started working with Mia which applies equally to this project as well even though this was obviously a project that I conducted in the US in my office instead of actually out in the field but regardless the work of documenting Human Rights violations and investigating the silences calls on us to embody Howard Zinn's notion of being activist archivists and to go beyond just serving as neutral gatekeepers of information we must scrutinize the traditional role of archivists of simply preserving and maintaining rather than analyzing or helping to shape the historical record we must continue to draw attention to those experiences and those voices that are all too often missing from official historical records kept in archives we must see these testimonies as a call to action a call for recognition of suffering and of perseverance and work together as archivists and educators to share these stories where appropriate and to advocate for those who have had their rights denied so thank you all very much for coming today and for allowing me to use my voice