 Hey, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar, we're a webcast, an online show. The terminology, as I say, is up for debate, whatever you want to call us. We call these things, but whatever you want to call us, we are here live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. If you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's okay. We do record the show every week, as we are doing this morning, and then they are posted onto our website. I will show you at the end of the day show where that is, so you can get all of today's recording, if you want to, and any of our previous sessions that we have done. The show and the live show and the recordings on our website are free and open to anyone to watch. If you are thinking of today's topic or one of our other topics of interest to any of your friends, family or colleagues, do pass on our links and information to them. Anyone who wants to can join up with us and then watch our recordings afterwards. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, book reviews, mini-training sessions, interviews, demos of software. Basically anything library related or could potentially be of interest to libraries, things libraries are doing, new products, resources, things they might be interested in. That's really our only criteria is that it somehow is of use to libraries out there. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do do presentations here, and we do some more Nebraska-centric things and things that we're doing here out of the Library Commission, but we do also bring in guest speakers, and that's what we've got today. On the line with us from just up the road in Omaha is Amy Schindler, who is the director of the Archives and Special Collections at the Chris Library at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Good morning, Amy. Good morning, Christa, and good morning, everyone. She's going to talk to us about a work in progress still. A new collection that they've started up at UNO, the Queer Omaha Archives. I heard about this on a colleague of mine, a librarian colleague shared about it on Facebook that you were having your dedication opening, some events about it in the last couple of months, and it seemed like a really cool local thing that was being done. So I reached out to Amy, and luckily she was available to join us and tell us a lot more about what's going on with this new archive. So I will just hand it over to you, Amy, to take it away and tell us about what you've been doing up there. Okay, thank you, Christa, for inviting me to do this Encompass Live presentation. We're really excited to share more about Nebraska Omaha's Queer Omaha Archives with everyone today. As Christa said, the Queer Omaha Archives is a very new project for us, and we really appreciate the Nebraska Library Commission's interest, as well as the interest and support of those of you who may be watching today or in our recorded future. So as I was thinking about this presentation over the last few weeks, one of the notes I wrote to myself was, why are we here today? What does UNO's Chris Library have to share? And the further than thought was, what's so special about what we're doing? Part of the answer that I found for myself is, firstly, it's actually really nice to be able to share the sometimes important, sometimes exciting, and the often enjoyable work we're doing at our institutions with others. But as I was thinking further about why should I do this webinar with the Queer Omaha Archives, it's not necessarily something new in the United States. I was reminded of other presentations I've attended or seen mentioned about new LGBTQ collections or collecting initiatives in recent years. There always seemed to be a few people in the audience or in the comments on blogs or other posts later who did not know that this was a thing, okay? So I'm here today to add to the body of work about LGBTQ archives and collections and also to remind myself and my GLAM colleagues out there that there's always more work for us, outreach and otherwise to do. I don't think I'm surprising anyone with that statement. So this work, of course, includes talking about our projects when we have access to form like this until everyone knows about our archives and our repositories. So today I'm going to talk about our collecting initiatives background, our partnerships involved in its creation and ongoing work, the mostly good news about the recent launch of the Queer Omaha Archives. And then we'll also talk a bit about our plans for moving forward, sort of what is next. So I'll begin with a few words just to situate myself in the Queer Omaha Archives. I'm a cisgender straight white woman archivist who's leading this collecting initiative. Further, I'm a new resident of Omaha and Nebraska, having set foot here on the Great Plains the first time less than three years ago. The Queer Omaha Archives joins a long list of similar collections in community, academic, historical societies, and other archives and special collections. LEGAR, the Lesbian and Gay Archives Round Table of the Society of American Archivists, is about over 30 years old. And its guide to repositories, Lavender Legacies, is about 20 years old. And just to interject here, my moment of feeling long in the tooth, as we say, last week was remembering how helpful Lavender Legacies was back in the early days of the internet, and then also recalling my own contributions to it, updating entries in the early days of this century. When you think back to the internet, you know, 15 and 20 years ago, it sort of makes one pause a little bit. My bigger point here though being just that the Queer Omaha Archives is joining many other established archives. And, you know, as we acknowledge, we are overdue for this initiative in Omaha and in Nebraska. So UNO's LGBTQ material in the archives prior to 2015 was not voluminous. We have some material in the Congressional Papers of Chuck Hagel, but that collection was closed. And much of what was in the University Archives was the usual type of material you would expect to find in a University Archives, including things like eight-and-a-half pilot and flyers like this one that were posted around campus, articles in the student newspapers, as well as some somewhat brief mentions in Faculty Senate and Task Force records. And as a side note, we might have some personal papers of LGBT folks here in the archives, but they were not identified as such at the time that those collections were initially accessioned. So that's a project to sort of go back and re-examine some of our collections to see what else may be in there as far as content and to do some additional description of those collections. So in 2014, Chris Library Archives and Special Collections revised its entire collecting statement for the first time since the Reagan administration. So the new portion of our collecting statement that relates to the Queer Omaha Archives is on your screen here. It reads, material in Special Collections includes unique and specialized items of local, state, and regional interest with a particular focus on Omaha history and culture, and then emphasis added here. Areas of focus are individuals and organizations which have traditionally been under-documented. We intentionally left this broad. We knew that there was a lot of work to be done in the Omaha community that could be done. We spent some time, myself and my colleague Bob Nash spent some time in 2014. We went on archives field trips and visited with some of our other colleagues here in the area at other cultural heritage institutions, learning about what they were collecting, sort of floating the ideas of things we were thinking about adding to our collecting statement and getting a little feedback from our colleagues. Here at UNO though, for a number of years prior to 2013 really, the archives faced a pretty sad circumstance that unfortunately many archives and special collections had faced. We didn't have enough staff, space was insufficient, and we didn't have enough resources. Actively collecting archival and manuscript collections was not always encouraged, supported, or frankly even possible. The good news for us is that between 2013 and 2015, the department doubled from four people to eight people. Our workspace was also significantly expanded and beautifully renovated. And relatedly, we also then had an increased emphasis on collecting new material for the archives and providing access. So what really, really got the Queer Omaha Archives off the ground came about last year. In October 2015 during LGBTQ History Month, Josh Berford of UNC Charlotte was invited to campus by my wonderful UNO colleague, Jesse Hitchens. Jesse is the director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center here at UNO's, it's part of UNO Student Affairs Unit. Josh Berford gave two talks about queer history and then another about queer archival and historical qualitative inquiry. His visit, as you can see, was co-sponsored by Sociology and Anthropology Department, the GSRC, and the Gender and Sexual Orientation Student Agency. As I said, the Queer Omaha Archives was created pretty directly because of this event. In the days before Berford visited campus, he reached out to me inquiring if the archives here had an interest in creating an LGBTQ collection, to which our answer was, yes, of course. We hadn't gotten to that yet, but we are very interested in it. And then followed up with, thank you very much for getting all these campus folks thinking about the possibility and talking about it, and getting the folks with potential interests together in a room. So after those two talks in November 2015, my campus colleague, Jesse Hitchens, put out a call to her extensive Rolodex of Campus and Community Contacts for meeting here in Chris Library to discuss creating an LGBTQ collection at UNO. The folks invited included representatives from various community organizations, representatives from student organizations, some queer faculty members, including those who were teaching courses that were part of a new LGBTQ and sexuality studies minor here at UNO that's directed by Professor Jay Irwin. And then, of course, Chris Library's Archives and Special Collections was at that meeting. Attendees, brainstorm potential collections and folks to contact for this new archives we were talking about. To start the meeting off, I provided some basic information about what an archives would and would not collect, how the donation process works, including the ever-exciting donor agreements, and also talked about potential financial contributions to support the ongoing work of the collection. We discussed how researchers might use the material because some people who aren't familiar with the work we do in archives, libraries, museums, of course, might ask, well, what's the point of collecting all this? What are you going to do with it? And then, of course, we also talked with folks about what we would do to care for the collection long term. And there's a bit of that work of reassuring folks that this isn't a passing fancy, it's not something we're just going to do for a year or five years, and then it will go away, or it will go away when a particular person or someone else leaves the university that there's a long-term commitment to care for this collection. We always want to reassure folks about that. We also explained to folks there that there are some things we would not want to add to the collection, and this might be for reasons of space, preservation needs, or that the material on offer was outside of our usual scope. For example, things like t-shirts. We're very fortunate, obviously, in 2016 to have the option to fairly easily photograph objects that we do not want to add physically to our collections. So we would then retain the photos of those items in our collection. And an example of t-shirts, we might even eventually submit the photos that we've added to our collection to a site like this, like wearinggayhistory.com, which is a wonderful site and you should go browse it if you haven't already. So also at our organizing meeting, we discussed the potential geographic scope of the collection. For those of you who are joining us from outside of Nebraska, I know there's a couple of you out there. You're probably like most of us who maybe haven't lived in the Midwest and not quite aware of where things are situated, but Omaha is located in the easternmost part of Nebraska. Driving across the state is a drive of around six hours, and we're very much a Midwestern city, as well as being part of the Great Plains. But I also think of us as being pretty close to my notion of the American West. Omaha is situated immediately across the Missouri River from Council Bluffs, Iowa. And about one half of the state's population lives here in the Omaha Metro area. At our initial organizing meeting back in November, we ultimately decided that the collection would collect material from the Omaha Metro area. This they defined that metro area. But we would also be open to collecting material from across the state of Nebraska in the future. If another cultural heritage organization in Lincoln or another community in the state did not have a particular interest or tie to collecting that material that might have been offered to us. So that metro area material does include very Western Iowa Council Bluffs since it's part of our metro area. Our attendees at our initial organizing meeting were also very interested in the potential oral history project. Many people of course are when they hear about it. We discussed possibilities for folks who could be interviewed and how we might go about collecting those interviews. And this is something that I have experienced with from work at a previous institution. We talked about how the oral history program could be a funded project. We could raise money to hire someone to do the oral history interviews. But we also talked about other options such as working with a small group of interested and trained individuals from the community or a specific organization. Or working with a UNO class faculty member and students who might collect oral history interviews as part of their coursework. We also had some further discussion of potential projects with UNO faculty related to their courses. As far as both the students going out and seeking material and letting us back in the archives know about material they'd come across. Maybe especially in private hands during the course of their own research. But then we also indicated that we could be interested, depending on what it was of course, be interested in adding material created by our students as part of their coursework that could then come to the archives. Our group also discussed long term goals related to fundraising. And it really warmed my heart how much folks in attendance understood the need to raise money to support this initiative both in the short and long term. We discussed things like potentially establishing an endowment and the possibility for renaming the collection to honor community members in the future. And sort of almost finally we knew when we were together that day that we wanted to hold a very public event to announce the collection of the public, to welcome the public. Not only into the archives and into the library but onto campus. We are a metropolitan university here at UNO and that community engagement and having members of the community come to our campus as well as those on campus go off campus, work with the community is very important. We initially thought that we would hold our community launch just a couple of months later in February. It was very ambitious of us. The final piece of business we discussed at that initial organizing meeting was what we were going to call this initiative. We had been referring to it more as a sort of a sentence like the name, it really wasn't a name proper. So after some discussion, the name Queer Omaha Archives was selected by those in attendance. In the weeks that followed our initial meeting with committee members and students and faculty members. Jesse Hitchens from the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center and I had a bit of a reality check with each other. We both acknowledged that we had a lot going on in those winter months. So we decided that we would delay our plans by a few months and hold our public reception announcing the collection in this summer. This time it was important to the archives and I think it's a successful launch for a number of reasons. First, we decided to hold our launch event this summer so we didn't have to worry about winter weather. But more importantly, after doing it in the summer allowed us to have it after our annual Heartland Pride Festival. And this of course would then allow us to do some outreach at Pride and related to Pride. Secondly, delaying that public launch gave me time in the archives to work with a very enthusiastic student to build the LGBTQ records in the University Archives. We probably had I would say less than 50 identified pages and that was mostly fires. When we were getting this started and working with that student, we've built that up to several cubic foot of records that now include publications, even more fliers, administrative records of student organizations, some memorabilia, and signs from protest and rallies like the one you see here. The student's passion and interest for the archives was frequently demonstrated as they made numerous trips from the student union to the library, bringing boxes of records from multiple student organizations and offering us various pieces of memorabilia. I just want to note here that we accepted some of the memorabilia and other material that our student offered, but we also declined some of what was offered. So that's just a reminder for all of us that appraisal is important. Even in the early stages of building a collecting initiative when you may be somewhat fearful, you know, you don't want to discourage people by saying no, but there are some things we should not accept and we need to be forthright with our potential donors and educate them about what we may and may not want. Before I leave this slide, I'll just share sort of my fun archives fact about this sign. At the bottom of this sign there, it's sort of dark in this particular version of the scan, but that's glitter. And this particular sign, after we received it over the winter, led to the creation of my favorite note on an archival container to date. And it always makes me giggle when I open that particular map case drawer. The folder reads, Warning, Contains Glitter. That's probably not something you see in most library collections, that kind of warning. Not usually. And, you know, at some point we may decide to encapsulate it or something. I could say, yeah, it could be like laminated or something to make it less falling off. No, no, Kristy, we never laminate. No. Okay, sorry. That's an evil word. We encapsulate. And plastic mylar sleeves. There you go, yeah. Yeah. And we've since received a couple other, these are signs, posters from rallies and protests and things. So we've received a few others that have glitter as well, but this is probably the first one and it's really probably my favorite. So I have to share that. Thank you. Thanks for that sidebar. So during this past spring semester, we also had an opportunity to continue solidifying some of the libraries and archives partnerships on campus with the UNO Gender and Sexuality Resources Center, but also with English professor, Tammy Kennedy. The library was a co-sponsor for a series of events last April that we dubbed the Sexuality Extravaganza, which included a screening of the wonderful documentary, TIG, with director Christina Golsby, and that was co-sponsored by Film Streams. And then we also had appearances by author Anna Pulley and artist Kelsey Beyer for their wonderful book, The Lesbian High Coup Book with Cats, Explanation Point. This partnership created an opportunity for the library to be included in these events. Some of them were held at the library, but when you co-sponsor an event, your name always gets mentioned, you know, on the publicity, but then at the actual, the book reading, the film screening. Not only was the library mentioned as a co-sponsor, but we also then would have an opportunity for this mention of, so hey, we're starting this new initiative called the Queer Omaha Archives here at UNO. And so that was a way to get that in front of some of our students and UNO employees. So that was great. Another partnership with English professor, Tammy Kennedy, was the ingestion of her students' work into the Queer Omaha Archives. Professor Kennedy offered her Queer Film course for the first time during the spring semester. She had decided to require her students to do their responses to films and some other writing on individual blogs that were created for the course. And early in the semester, she extended the invitation to her students to add their blogs to the Queer Omaha Archives after talking with us, of course. And according to Professor Kennedy, when she offered this to the students, they were all excited by the offer, and she said it seemed to make them a bit more thoughtful about the work that they were producing. And this is just a photo of Professor Kennedy, her students, and some of their guests at a film screening. In this upcoming fall semester, we're going to work with Professor Kennedy and another faculty member on two different courses they're doing. And their students are going to have an oral history component. And the intention there is that those oral histories that they're collecting with Omaha community members will be added to the Queer Omaha Archives. So let me move on to the public launch of the collection. We signed up to share a table with our friends from the Gender and Sexuality Resources Center at Heartland Pride Festival in Pest June. This is our ad that appeared in the Pride program. We paid a little extra for that. And then we also distributed this on postcard-sized flyers at Pride. And on the reverse side was a brief blurb about what the archives was with a link to our contact info on our website. And then, as Christy mentioned, how she heard about this whole thing was also shared widely in the community on Facebook and other platforms. And, you know, thanks to Facebook, it really, you know, Christy, you're living your proof of it. But I heard from a lot of other folks too at Pride and then also at our public launch, you know, sort of chatting them up. So how did you hear about this, you know, to hear about it from so-and-so or so-and-so? And, you know, I just, I saw it on Facebook. So, you know, as much as I bemoan Facebook some days, it's helpful. It definitely has its uses, yes, absolutely. And I think I actually saw someone link to this flyer somewhere, like online or something. I do recognize it, yeah, from what I was looking at on Facebook, yeah. And I mean, that's something to talk about is sort of how much I think about when I had my first, like, academic archive job, archive's job, you know, 15 years ago. And I remember going out and prospecting for collections at the time. And it was, I was sending paper letters because, you know, if they had a website, it often didn't have even an email on it. I just had to call people on the phone. So, you know, we still do that now, but it certainly, it took a lot more effort, you know, to get that reach that we're able to get much quicker now. You have to use all of the resources you have at hand, yeah. Any type of promotional area you can get into. Absolutely. So, and a further result of that sharing on Facebook was about a week before Heartland Pride, I was contacted by Terry Sweeney. Mr. Sweeney had lots of questions for me about this new collecting initiative he'd heard about on Facebook. He was asking questions that, frankly, I do not typically receive from, you know, prospective donor during our first chat. He was asking about our, what was our funding model going to be? What was our long-term sustainability plan? He would even quiz me about the particulars of our collecting policy that he had browsed our website and found. Someone who was reading our collecting policy was quite impressive. But during that conversation, it was a long conversation. He very quickly decided that he wished to donate his collection to us in honor of his deceased life partner Pat Phelan. The Terry Sweeney and Pat Phelan papers include local magazines that they had a role in publishing called The New Voice. Also programs that you see here, lots of photos, several scrapbooks, a good bit of memorabilia and more material. Terry is a fairly organized person, I would say. As you can see on the right there, I think you'd read it, on the Ziploc bags, which you might chuckle at, but he's labeled the Ziploc bags as to their contents. So we know that, you know, those two banners, which marches they were from, they were carried by the Nebraska delegations at the marches on Washington in the 80s and early 90s. And one of them was actually signed by the folks from Nebraska who attended the 1987 march on Washington. So the collection includes lots of interesting documents and photographs, as well as some of that memorabilia. And frankly, because of the perfect timing of Terry's gift, you know, these photos you see here, these were sort of the quick photos I took with my camera, you know, day or two before Pride, as well as a few others, and, you know, put them on an iPad and was able to show those two folks that we were talking with at Pride, when we were talking about these are the types of things that we already have in the Queer Omaha archives, and that we want more of. So here is a picture of our table at Heartland Pride Festival, and the little close up there at the top is, you have to have giveaways. People love the giveaways. So we had a whole bunch of things, including the UNO beach balls, which children of all ages enjoy beach balls. I can tell you that. But we also had some temporary tattoos, excuse me, temporary tattoos and some buttons. The library recently got a button maker, and people have been very enthusiastic about using our button maker. We were also fortunate that our wonderful student supporter also promoted the Queer Omaha Archives for us at a separate Pride event the evening before that was specifically for teens and young people. That very warm Nebraska Saturday, we talked to over 400 people at our table during the just under six hours that we were able to keep ourselves hydrated. And this included members of the general public who were walking by stopped by to get a pen or a button or what have you, and we chatted them up. But it also included folks from other community organizations, and some of the folks who I had been emailing with in the weeks leading up to Pride about potential donations to the archives did stop by the table. I told them we would be there, and then I hope they would stop by. And several of them actually did stop by the table, and we were able to have brief conversations. But it was also just important that they could see me and meet me and realize I was a real person and not just somebody behind an email address. And I think of benefit for the university is that we also ended up talking with a number of students who were going to be coming to UNO. So they were incoming freshmen or transfer students or graduate students who were at Pride. Some of them were there with their parents. And that was a nice opportunity to talk about the university as an inclusive environment. And I think that made some of the parents who we were seeing that day freshman feel a little bit better about their little ones leaving the nest. So we invited everyone to visit our website to come to the opening on July 13. We had cards that we were handling out, our cards with more information, the invitation that we were handing out that day. So the actual launch. About a month before our opening reception, Jesse Hitchens and I met with a colleague from our university communications office. And we were actually thrilled because they had contacted us about a press release for the Queer Omaha Archives and potential media placements. So that announcement went out the week before the event. The announcement that was written by the university was picked up and published in a few local papers as those press releases often are. And then Jesse and I spoke with a reporter from the Omaha World Herald, which is our major newspaper here. And she wrote an article for the newspaper. I was also interviewed by a local radio station before the actual reception. And then a local TV station came to the reception and filmed some B-roll footage. And they included mention of our reception in sort of one of those around the metro, you know, 30-second news highlight clips that you see on the local news. So we were happy with the media coverage that the Queer Omaha Archives opening received. I was, however, once again reminded that the online comment section of newspaper articles, apparently especially on Facebook, in the case of the Omaha World Herald newspaper, are often not what I would call an affirming and happy place to visit. So in the interest of self-care, just a reminder to everyone, it can be important to schedule something joyful or cleansing to do after reading those comments. Some people use the phrase, you know, just never read the comments. But sometimes it is, I think it's important. You'll see in all sorts of topics that some things it'll be agreeable and some not. It's better to be aware of what's going on out there. But then, yeah, I like your idea. Just, you know, afterwards do something good for yourself. Yeah, I sort of very intensely waited until Saturday afternoon, read the comments, and then I went to the Jocelyn Art Museum and saw an exhibit I've been waiting to see. And I haven't gone back to revisit the comments since. But, you know, I don't want to, there were actually some people in there, you know, trying to have a discussion, but there were some folks who were, you know, less inclusive than I wish they would be. But I will say that I want to make sure that everyone knows that we are going to include copies of all of those comments in the Queer Omaha Archives in our ephemera collection. So we want to make sure that we document the public's reception of the collection, and that'll include the happy photos from our reception, as well as those comments that people made on a news article. It's all part of history, yes. It is, and we do get to choose what we put in the archives. So we're, you know, we're choosing to put that in there. One thing reporters, I was asked by a reporter for this opening, and I've been asked about other collections and other repositories I've worked at, is what are people's reaction to this new collection? And then the sort of their follow-up question is, you know, is your boss okay with it? Is the president, you know, of the university or the chancellor? Have they said anything to you? And usually at that point, you know, it hasn't maybe gone public until there hasn't been much of a reaction. And so it's not until that newspaper article comes out that you sort of hear that, any negative reaction. But it happened, so be prepared for that. So this, I just want to mention here, kind of a quick sidebar. The button here is about amendment 416. This anti-amendment 416 button was actually offered to the Queer Omaha Archives the day before our opening reception, maybe two days by my wonderful library colleague, Angela Krueger. And it was actually a great item to have in the collection, and I was like, oh no, we are displaying this at the reception. There's no answer about it. And actually, more than one person when I was chatting with them at the reception or afterwards said, you know, I've got some things about 416 I've been holding on to. And it wasn't a lot of material, but they had something they had held on to. And do you think you might want that for the archives? And we were like, yes, of course, please offer us that material. We would love to have it. That's the idea, yeah. And I should say Angela is who I saw about the archives on Facebook from. She's the one who shared about the opening and got me connected with you. Got us, got us, got us together. Angela is one of my colleagues here in our archives and special collections. She's a cataloger. So back to the party. So we held the opening reception for the Queer Omaha Archives about actually two weeks ago on July 13. We were absolutely thrilled to welcome over 80 guests to CURSE Library Archives and Special Collections that evening. Our target audience for the event was the general public, but it was also open to you and employees and students. And we ended up with guests split pretty closely between those populations of members of the public, UNO students and UNO employees. And while a number of our wonderful library colleagues came to show their support, we also welcomed folks from across campus, most of whom had never visited archives and special collections. So that was wonderful for us. The Archives and Special Collections staff and students, I have to say, did amazing work that leading up to it to make it a success and provide all of our guests with a great experience. You can see in the top two photos there, we have a display of items from the Queer Omaha Archives that we staged in our workroom. And our workroom is where we do all of our arrangement and description of collections. And then we also had a brief program that included Jesse Hitchens there on the lower left and the Dean of the UNO Libraries, Dave Richards. They talked about our goals and dreams for the collection, including future potential donations, this, you know, potential oral history program, paid student internships, possible paid student internships, hoped for student internships, hoped for fundraising and more. And so it usually happens to archivists when you get into conversation. That evening we heard about many basements, garages, and storage units that needed to be visited. We also heard about personal stories from folks that needed to be recorded. They didn't have any records, but they have a story to share. And also as we were talking with maybe the younger professionals who joined us that evening, the younger folks, the non-students, younger folk, and then some newer members of the Omaha community as well, we were talking with them about potential outreach and other kinds of events that we could hold with the Queer Omaha Archives or that we could hold in the library's archives, you know, hosting, you know, they do like a monthly happy hour and we could host that in the archives and have a display of material just for, there's a local group here in Omaha called Rebel. That's kind of a younger lesson of the reception. It was past time for my wonderful colleagues from archives who'd been there from the beginning of the reception to go home. And then a bit later, as I said to a few enthusiastic guests a little later, as the library was closing, we would maybe host future events in the library during the academic year where the library's open until midnight. That night we were only open until nine. So what's next for the Queer Omaha Archives? We have a number of community members and organizations that we're following up with about donating collections. I've heard from multiple community members who'd like to volunteer with us on organizing collections, and we decided we're going to have one volunteer start in August and then we're going to wait a few months when we have some more collections and have things a bit more ready to bring in further volunteers in the community. We are going to be talking with an organization next month about a potential fundraising initiative. We want to capitalize on the success of our opening reception and ensure that we maintain contact with attendees. Conveniently, our library here at UNO recently welcomed a new communications specialist to our staff. She actually joined us the week before the reception. So we're going to be talking with her about how best to maintain a flow of information to folks who are interested in the Queer Omaha Archives. We're also talking with an arts organization about potential joint programming in the months ahead. And this is someone the library has never previously worked with, so that's pretty exciting for us. And we'd also like to hear from local and regional cultural heritage organizations who may have an interest in working together on this or related initiatives. We set up the Queer Omaha Archives site, this site on OMECA, just to show folks how we can display digital objects that are part of the collection, as well as to serve as a home for information about the Queer Omaha Archives. You can see that it includes information about how to make donations. There's a link there to the university's foundation, so people can get dropped in and make a gift directly to the Queer Omaha Archives fund. We set up the OMECA site also in part because this past spring, the library was going through a website redesign, and we're moving from one platform to a new CMS. Pages were changing. We weren't going to be able to sort of update things in the weeks leading up to the public launch this summer in Pride. So the OMECA site allowed us to promote, you know, we're going to be at Pride on Saturday, see us there, and, you know, save the day to have that information out there for folks. Our OMECA site also links to finding aids that we have for collections that are part of the Queer Omaha Archives. You can see here we use Archive Space for our collection management system. And just a cataloging note, as my colleague Angela and I were working on accessioning these first collections for the Queer Omaha Archives, she raised the matter of how should we identify those collections in their finding aids. And at her suggestion, we went with, you can see there at the bottom, a local subject heading that just says Queer Omaha Archives. And everything donated after November 2015 that was given with some intention by the donor for the Queer Omaha Archives will receive this subject heading. And then what we're doing to connect any collections we received prior to the official launch of the Queer Omaha Archives is we have, we use live guides for our research guides. And we can see we have a whole bunch of different subject guides for things from archives and special collections. So we'll use this for material-related LGBTQIA history on live guides. So thank you again, everybody. The Queer Omaha Archives at UNO Chris Library Archives and Special Collections, as we said, was established to collect, to provide access to, and preserve the history of LGBTQIA life in the region. We have a long way to go in the work ahead of us. But the enthusiastic response, mostly enthusiastic response, this collecting initiative from partner organizations, members of the public, students and others has in my, I will acknowledge, biased opinion been wonderful for the archives, but also pretty darn good for the library and the university as well. I think it's opening the eyes of many folks on and off campus to the potential of partnerships between the archives, the library and community organizations, as well as just generating some goodwill. One of the first bits of feedback we actually received from outside of our initial bubble of supporters was from the parent of a new graduate, actually. The parent heard about the Queer Omaha Archives at the university's lavender graduation this past spring. And they told the university's chancellor, you know, the boss, the boss-boss, that they thought this was a great thing, the Queer Omaha Archives. So yay, archives. And thank you to those parents. So thank you again for your interest in listening to me this morning, and I'm happy to take any questions. Awesome. Okay, thanks, Amy. That was great. That was exactly what I was looking for to find out what was going on. Like I said at the beginning, I know this is a work in progress, something that I'm new. Well, yes. But I was glad to hear about it and get to see, you know, get the word out about what you are doing there. If anyone does have any questions, type them into your questions section of the GoToWebinar interface, and I will grab them and pass them on to Amy. And we do have some that did come in while you were talking. I have a note to myself that I'd say, when I saw what Terry had done with wagging and labeling all those things, I'm like, that must be like a librarian at heart or something. How it's so organized. He's a collector. He's a senior. He's a personality. He is a savior and a collector. But he's also a donor. He's going to start volunteering with us next month on organizing his collection. But he was also very generous with his time when he brought in the first two accessions of material and wanted to sit down. He didn't just want to leave it and drop it off the boxes and go. He wanted to sit down and we walked through a lot of material he donated. But there's a lot more for him to do as far as identifying people and events and things, especially in photographs. That's what you need somebody to sit down. Unless something's been written on or something's been included with it. That's what you usually end up with in a lot of these cases. I don't know who these people are or what you remember. Cool. So yeah, a few questions we have come in. Can you give an example of something that you didn't accept as a donation? Something that did not meet the criteria you guys have set? Well, a number of things that Terry offered actually. And he's loaned them to us and we're going to return them to him. So the big one that comes to mind is plaques and awards. And these are from various organizations, employers, community organizations. Icon, a local group here in Nebraska, EGLE, which was an employee group of what was U.S. West. So things like that. Let's see. I'm trying to think what else Terry... I mean, we accepted a lot of Terry's memorabilia, frankly, because it's in great condition. And he had some really interesting pieces. Like you can see in the photograph here at the front of the photo there in the middle of the table. That's a brick that's been decorated with some, not glitter, but some detailing, glitter-like detailing. But it's actually a brick from the Diamond Bar, which was here in Omaha. And it was known as our Nebraska's oldest gay bar. Now, there's some things we're hearing about. There was a gay bar that was actually in Omaha in the 40s that we want to follow up on. But the point is that the Diamond Bar was known as the oldest gay bar in Nebraska. So that was something that was given...the brick, the decorated brick, was given to Pat Phelan, Terry's partner, by the owner of the Diamond Bar. I think when it was either moving or when it closed. Nice. That's just something to be aware of. The question about something you didn't accept, that this is something that's not even just specific to your collection, but libraries in general having your collection policies. So people know what is and isn't accepted. We have the same thing here at the commission. We have our Nebraska Memories Project. There are certain things we can take, and it just has the criteria that what is and isn't, you know, what we're looking for. And that can also be adjusted in the future if you suddenly discover, wait, this is actually something that we didn't realize was important. It's not in stone. And if somebody out there would like to give us a financial gift to create an endowment to hire someone and to buy the supplies in this storage space to care for some of that, you know, like t-shirts and other kind of like drag costumes, they take a lot of space and resources to care for. And special, special, special like rooms, climate one, not to just preserve them properly. Right. Well, we have the climate controlled storage room. It's just sort of the space in that room and the boxes or the mannequins and things like that. So, you know, the t-shirts, that's something that we're not planning to accept, but we definitely plan to sort of grasp them. Right. Do you have any plans to digitize anything and to make it available in that way to people who can't come to Omaha to... Yeah. So on our Omeka site there, which again, we set up as a quick demonstration site, you can see on the right hand side there, there's two buttons. And those are, again, those are two buttons from Terry's collection. And again, we photograph those with my phone very quickly so I could take them to Pride Festival and show them to people and then also went ahead and just put that photo into Omeka. But there, yes, we've had conversations with some people who they maybe don't want to donate the original to us, but they're willing to let us digitize it, or it's born digital, of course. And so that content will put into this Omeka site. That's something that you could, but do you have like the scanning equipment for that? Or is that something you'd also need donations for? We do, yeah. Like the scan documents and whatnot. Yeah, no, we're fortunate. We have a couple of very nice flatbed scanners. We have a nice book guy overhead scanner. We have the library has cameras, and so we have like the black backdrop where we can set up a little photo studio to shoot artifacts nicely. So you won't be able to see the laminate table in the background when we shoot these pins. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're the special collections to begin with. You've got your resources there, and this is a subset of that. Right. I was actually really, when I saw that Angela shared this, I was like, oh, this is great. I know we have, you know, there's the bars here in Lincoln and Omaha for this, and we have the population, the group here. And I was actually, I think I was a little surprised that it wasn't already something. I think, I know you said somebody didn't even know it was a thing. I was like, really? Parades. We have such a, we have parades and events and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I was actually surprised myself. Do you know, this is Omaha, and you said it's for the region, which is kind of a nice, greater Omaha region. Nice to make it a little vague, I guess, so you can expand as you need. Do you know if UNL here in Lincoln is thinking of doing something or has something similar, or are you guys working together? So when we had that initial organizing meeting last winter, you know, folks were, some of the folks in the room were very, this should be a Nebraska-wide collection. And so I could actually have that conversation with them about, well, you know, we don't want, if someone else is collecting this in Lincoln or in Grand Island or somewhere else, we don't want to step on their toes. You know, we like to respect each other's, you know, our repositories and work together and collaborate. So I said, you know, let me reach out to my colleague Mary Ellen Ducey at UNL and see what they're doing, if they have any plans, if they'd like to. And so I, you know, emailed Mary Ellen and said, you know, we're planning to do this. You know, are you doing something similar? Because if you are, we'll stay out of Lincoln and we won't collect anything. We'll refer everyone to you. So we had that contact and UNL was focusing on collecting from UNL organizations and groups. And I did some kind of quick web surfing. I didn't contact every repository in Nebraska. So if anyone out there is collecting from Nebraska, I would, I'd love to chat with you. I think we could work together. Yeah, I was going to say it doesn't have to be, you're separate because you're in different locations. It could be something you guys should be referring people to each other. You know, someone's in Lincoln and or is, you know, in Omaha, but only heard about Lincoln. So what Lincoln's doing, Lincoln should be saying, oh, it's okay. You've got, there's, go up there. You know, that's where you're actually, that's where you live. Check out their set or if there's something out west or something. You guys should be able to, you know, send people between them and all or have links to their websites or our databases or digitized collections or whatever. And frankly, I mean, we're always looking to partner with people here at UNO. So if somebody somewhere else is another repository, another cultural heritage organization in Nebraska or even in Council Bluffs, Iowa does want to start their own collection. Let's talk and I'm very happy. We could create a site that is, you know, we come up with a different name that sort of like the Nebraska queer archives or something like that. Like the Nebraska queer consortium and then here's all those individual archives that are part of it in their different various areas. They're planning this right now. Yeah, maybe it'd be a little more aggressive. It would be maybe the Great Plains or something like that. Oh yeah. And I should say too, there are people who are doing this in other parts of the country. So like George Berthard at UNC, he started an initiative called Queering the South. And so he's trying to get, you know, representatives from all the southern states to kind of work together or share their info. I'm not sure how that's going, but I know he was hoping to do that. So if anybody wants to queer the Great Plains, let's talk. Let's do it. Absolutely. I know our colleagues, you know, at the University of Wyoming, they did amazing work after the horrible, horrible murder of Matthew Shepard. You know, in documenting, you know, the online and social media response to his murder. So people are doing this and why not work together? Absolutely. Well, being you being so new, as you said, to the Great Plains, not native to here, which I am not. I am as well. I've been here longer than you, about 15 years now. I can't believe it, but it's been that long. I'm originally from, huh? I said you blink, and it's, you know, that's embarrassing. And I don't know if I'm considered a native or not, I don't know how long that takes, but I'm originally from New York. You've done a great job of grasping what's going on out here and getting this collection and archives going, and I think it's awesome. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. And yeah, anybody have any, we're almost to the top of the hour again. So I just wanted to put it out there. Anybody have any last minute urgent questions for Amy about what she's doing or any ideas or thoughts about other collections or things you know about? Let's get them into the questions section there. While you're working on that, I'll tell you, we are recording. So this will be up on our YouTube, as we mentioned earlier, and then Amy up. I'll send it to you. Link to it, grab the YouTube video for whatever use you want to put it in the collection and all. I have also grabbed all the various websites and locations you've mentioned that I could find online and put into our delicious account. And Library Commission uses delicious to collect links to various things. It just makes it easy to get it onto our recording page afterwards. So some of the different groups, the Gender and Sexual Research Center. LIGAR from the Society of American Archivists, your website. So we've got a lot of these things linked in there. That'll be available to everyone afterwards, so you'll be able to quickly grab them. We do sometimes do the presentation. I'm not sure, do you have these slides somewhere or do you want to just, we can do whatever with the slides? The Chris Library has a digital comment site UNO. So I'll be putting the slides and the text of my talk in there as well as a link to the video. Cool, perfect. All right. Then if you can send me that link, I can link back to it so we have them all connected in there all together. Perfect. All right. Librarians, we're all about saving and linking and archiving. Absolutely. Well, it doesn't look like any urgent questions. So come in. Just some thanks. Great project. Glad we got to hear about it. Comments coming in. So that is great. All right then. Thank you, everyone, for attending. Thank you, Amy, for being here with us this morning. I wasn't able to make it up to what you had your opening, but I'm hoping at some point. I go visiting up to Omaha regularly. I hope to come in some time and take a look at it in person. Wow. And certainly you'll be here for the NLA meeting, the Nebraska Libraries. I will, yes, in October. Yeah. We'll have a reception here at the library. So stop in then. Oh, right. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that'd be a perfect time. Yeah, because I will be up there for those three days of the conference. Yep. And October is LGBTQ History Month, so it's a nice thing. Yes. Great. All right. I'm going to pull back the screen control to my page here. There we go. This is just our delicious, as I was working on most recently, page. But this is the Library and Compass Lives website. If you need to look for us online, if you actually just Google, Encompass Live, we are the only thing out there called that so far. So lucky us. You'll come up with our website. This is where the archives will be here right underneath our upcoming sessions as all of our archived ones as all of our previous ones. Going back to the first one we did, which was in January 2009, all of our recordings are on YouTube. Links are here. This is from the last week's show. And then presentations, they'll be in various places. We try to link to them wherever they might be. We have a slide share account. Some people put them on their own websites in Prezi. As Amy said, linking out to their page. But we try if we can to link to wherever something would be available. And any other handouts or documents that people may include in their sessions. So that should be up there. If everything processes and works and plays nice with me today, by this afternoon, I should have it up and I can let you guys all know that it's available. So that will wrap it up for today's show. I hope you join us next week when our topic is the Crouettes Bennett Donor Advised Fund. This is a program for giving grants to specifically to small town libraries, public libraries in Nebraska. Richard Miller will be here, our Library Development Director. And Reggie Carlson, who is with the Nebraska Community Foundation, who works with this grant fund. Along with some libraries who have received the fund, the grant itself. And I believe one of the relatives of Shirley Crouettes Bennett is coming to join us as well. They are still involved with the grant program. So if you're looking for something to help out your small town public library here in Nebraska, check that out. And any of our upcoming shows we have here, we've got August all fully booked and on the schedule. And I'm always working on new shows. So September, October and upcoming dates will be added as we get things finalized. So keep an eye on our page for that. Also, we are on Facebook. So if you are a big Facebook user, there we go. Like our Encompass Live page, I post updates. Like here I post this morning, log in right now for this week's Encompass Live. People are coming on the fly. When our recordings are available, I'm going to put the notice on here. So if you're big on Facebook, do give us a like over there. And you can keep up with what we are doing here at Encompass Live. Other than that, that wraps up for this morning. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Amy. And we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye-bye.