 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Kristen Porter from the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. The show is broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show every week, and it is then posted to our website and our archives, and I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of those archives. We post both the recording of the show, and if there are any handouts or presentations, like our presenters this morning have slides, those will be included as well for you to view afterwards. Both of the live show and the recordings archives are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, colleagues, neighbors, anybody who you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. And we do quite a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, book reviews, interviews, mini-training sessions, demos of services and products, anything you think that may be of interest to libraries, and libraries in general are really our only focus here for those of you that aren't aware of Nebraska. The Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for all libraries in the state, so we handle support and training and education for K-12 academics, publics, correction facilities, museums, basically anything and everything, that's a library, we're here for them. So you'll find a real range of things on our shows. We do sometimes have Nebraska Library Commission staff do presentations about things we're doing via through the commission, but we also bring guest speakers. And as we have this morning on the line with us, and we're all in three different locations today in Nebraska, it's kind of cool, technology is great. I'm here in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Amy Schindler, she is Director of Archives and Special Collections at UNO, which is University of Nebraska Omaha at the Chris Library. Good morning, Amy. Good morning. And then Lorenda, is that how you pronounce your name, I forgot? Weiss. Linda Weiss is the University Archivist at the University of U.N.K., as we call it, University of Nebraska at Carney. So I'm in Lincoln, Amy's a little north in Omaha, and Lorenda is farther west out in Carney, but that's great about this. We've got both of you on the show to talk about these great oral history projects that you've been working on, both of you in each of your locations. And this is going to have a presentation about both of their projects that they're doing. So I'll just hand it over to you guys, take it away, and talk about what you've been working on. All right. Well, thank you. So I'm going to be starting us off, and I'm going to be talking about what we call, Coming to the Plains, Latino or Latina stories in central Nebraska. So we wish to first recognize that we are the guests living on lands represented by Native nations, whose sovereignty, governance, and treaty lands existed long before the state of Nebraska. These nations include the Omaha, Ponca, Santee, Hochunker Winnebago, Lakota, Pawnee, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Oto, Missouri, Iowa, Ka, SAC, and Fox or Muscoviki, Kekapu, and Delaware. So just a little background for those of you who might be less familiar. UNK began as a normal school focused on teacher training, although it branched out since it's still really heavily focuses on training educators. And that's part of why we incorporate a lot of experiential learning and student assistance within our project, which I'll be talking about more a little bit later. We have about 5,300 undergrads and 1,600 grad students. The university as a whole is about 10% Hispanic or Latino. So some colleges like the College of Education are closer to about 50% Latino. We also have a really strong undergraduate research program, and we've been able to incorporate some of those students as part of our project as well. The archives and special collections here at UNK has historically been focused primarily on the institutional records. That means we collected things by and about the university. However, when I got here in 2015, we expanded our collecting policy. So we now explicitly collect materials related to student life, the history of education because of our background as a normal school, and the history of Central and Western Nebraska. So we're not trying to poach from any communities or societies that might already be working in Central and Western Nebraska, but a lot of organizations are focused either on only the really old material or have very specific collecting folk IA. So the origins of this project began as a collaboration between myself and archives, Dr. Michelle Warren, who teaches Spanish and modern languages, and Jacob Rosdale, who's a videographer in the communications department. Michelle and I were chatting originally, and she has a lot of strong ties with Spanish-speaking students. And I had a really strong interest in documenting parts of our university community that haven't been before, which I'll talk about more in a bit. So we proposed filling some of these gaps in the archives and more fully documenting our students' lives and the Spanish-speaking community's lives with an oral history project. This is focused specifically on those who immigrated to Central Nebraska from elsewhere, although we did have a few participants who were born in the area or in the U.S. Our initial funding was provided by our campus Research Services Council Diversity Grant, and this let us do things like pay our participants, cover gas, and then all the nitty-gritty stuff, pay for flash drives, things like that. So one of the huge objectives here, which I've talked about a little bit, is to fill archival silences. And the term archival silences refers to gaps in our collecting holdings. And a lot of these got there because traditionally, archives focused on the story of those in power. So for most of history, that would have been white men in power, landowners, or wealthier men. And even now, I've noticed that our archives wasn't doing an adequate job on covering the stories of those who were not in power. So it covered the university administration less so on the student side. We also really wanted to use this opportunity to do some outreach with the Latino communities locally to capture their stories. We wanted to let them drive the project too as much as we could. We also see a lot, especially in our current political climate, of misunderstandings related to immigration and immigrants. So we hoped that some of what we were doing here could help our local communities, both immigrant and those who were born and raised here, to better understand each other. And we also wanted to use this opportunity to engage students in research, which we are able to do from a bunch of different perspectives. So these are just a few of our partnerships, faculty, students, and communities. For those of you who aren't familiar with the area, this is the demographics of a few of our surrounding communities. And these are the communities that participated in this project. You can see that Carney itself is only about 4% Latino, versus Lexington, just west of us, is about 60% Latino. So that was part of the reason that we chose the communities we did. So the surrounding communities have a higher percentage of Spanish speakers. They also have more diverse communities. And then of course, logistically, they're all within about an hour of Carney. We did do a few scattered interviews in other communities as well, but these were the bulk of them. We're in these couple surrounding communities here. All right. So one big aspect when we were putting together our project was going to be informed consent. And this is partly because we were potentially working with people of different immigration statuses. And because of the types of questions we're asking, which you'll get to take a look at in just a minute, it could be our questions that could expose people's immigration statuses. So we wanted to make it really clear to participants that that was a potential risk. And because these are created to be shared publicly, preferably with names or some identifiers, that they're not going to be anonymous, not going to be hidden necessarily. However, we also didn't want to take people's names away from them. So if people were comfortable being identified, we didn't want to say, oh, hey, we've decided it's too much risk for you. So we won't let you use your names. So we came up with four different forms of identification that our participants can choose from. And this ranged from completely anonymous to fully identified. And this ended up being less of an issue than we initially thought. We had all but one participant choose to use full identification. And in general, we found that most of our interviews thus far, when they've talked about their immigration status, are legal currently. So I will go through all of these questions. These are available on the linked website. But these aren't what we used as a starting place. In general, you can see we're collecting some basic information about the countries that they're starting from. And then we're asking about their experience coming here and asking them to make some comparisons. Between their life here and in their home countries. We did want to leave our questions fairly open-ended in general. So that participants can choose what aspects of their lives they want to share with us. As, of course, as part of informed consent, we also explicitly tell them, hey, if there's a question you don't want to answer, that's absolutely fine. Feel free to skip anything that you'd prefer not to answer and move on to the next. We also want to give participants opportunities to start a dialogue. Traditional oral history might have just been me the interviewer against you the interviewee and you the interviewee should share your whole life with me and I'm not expected to give any details at all. We really wanted to create a dialogue and create these connections. And one thing that enabled this, I'm going on to recruitment, is that a lot of our initial participants are the family and friends of students working on our project. And a lot of them, Dr. Warren already had existing relationships with. So we started out with these personal contacts and then we also did some snowball sampling. So just asking people that were interviewed, hey, do you know anyone else that has a great story or would like to share their story with us. And we were asking people to share our contact information with people they know rather than vice versa just so that the participants retain more control over the project and we're not accidentally ending up in contact with someone who would be very uncomfortable being contacted by someone like us in a position of some authority. So we also created some advertisements as well for local communities and businesses though the vast majority of our participants have come from the first two methods. So to this point, we've had people from 17 countries or 17 completed, sorry, and seven countries represented. Not unexpectedly, the bulk of the participants are from Mexico. We did have a few from the United States and I believe one each from many of the rest of the countries listed there. So we're continually seeking to capture the diversity within the Latino community, realizing that it's not one unified whole as well. So that part of our project goal was to capture stories from a variety of different countries as well. In talking to our participants, a lot of common themes come out. One was the importance of religion. In some cases this was, life was really hard. So I draw on God to see me through. Or sometimes it was more general, more about their faith or things like that. And then hardship, obviously most of our participants had quite a journey to get to where they are now. And the hardships ranged from, we had one participant that said, yeah, I lost one kid to starvation. So that was our main motivation for coming to the US. And we do have a lot of those stories or gangs were targeting me. So we came to the US. The importance of family was a huge one here too. A lot of the people that participated in our project would say, yeah, coming to Nebraska, let us live together as a family versus working separately in migrant workers. Also opportunities. A lot of parents would say, we moved here so that my children could get an education, something that might not have been possible where they originally lived. And that a sense of community and traditions which are generally important to all of us as well. So our goal here is fully bilingual materials. Part of this is due to generational gaps in language abilities. Some of our younger participants chose to do their interviews in English and their parents don't speak any English at all. And we really wanted their parents to be able to interact with their children's interviews. Also, this makes it easier to share with a wide variety of communities. So right now, transcriptions are mostly done and they've been done by students working in their native languages. The Spanish ones were done by Latina, mostly first and second generation students. And our other ones, the English ones, were done by students who are generally majoring in Spanish or Spanish education. The translation, we're really lucky. We've incorporated this as part of one of our modern languages classes that's on translation. So they've been working through the materials as a group. And then we have two of the best students from that who are also additionally working on that. How we've been able to do some of this is the funding that I mentioned earlier was available to pay student workers specifically. So instead of outsourcing some of these like we might have otherwise, student workers have been a great benefit as far as getting this material transcribed and translated and as far as incorporating more people into the project as well. Like any project, things don't always go smoothly. We did run into, of course, some institutional bureaucracy, some issues that I'll just mention briefly. Timing of Institutional Review Board, the changes to the common rule were initially supposed to take place earlier. So we were told to hold on to our IRB application. So we got a delayed start on the project because of that. And then we are paying all of the people who were interviewed as part of this project. So it took us a bit of time to figure out how we could do that without having to collect names and social security numbers. Just to give our participants more options as far as how they're identified. And then of course, as all of you have worked as students who know, student reliability can always be an issue. And then we had some delays on the technical side as well. And if you see anything here you'd like me to talk about more later, feel free to note it and I can answer questions about it later. So next we're going to move on to photography of selected interviewees. All the project materials are going to go into our institutional repository, including transcription, translation and video of the interviews. We're also working on a podcast, YouTube channel, traveling exhibits, which we've had some people already kind enough to volunteer to host and potentially a longer form piece such as a documentary. I'll leave you with a quote from one of our participants and she's both a student and was interviewed for the project. So in her words, I think it's important that our stories get told because our voice is all we have to express ourselves. By having it out there, someone is going to hear and relate to it and want to tell their stories. We will create a collective book of stories that are unique to each person. And with that, I'll turn you over to Amy. Okay, thank you, Larenda and thank you all for joining us today. I need to begin talking about UNO's LGBTQ plus oral history initiative with a few words to situate myself in relation to the collection. I'm a cis straight white woman archivist leading this collecting initiative. Further, I'm a relatively new resident of Omaha, Nebraska. I'm having set foot here for the first time only about five years ago. So I'm not a member of the communities we are documenting with our oral history project. And I've been very conscious of that from before the project began and throughout. And so conscious of that and trying to work with members of those communities who we want to do a collective oral histories from. So next slide, Larenda. Okay, so the queer Omaha archives is a newcomer to a list of similar collections in community, academic and other repositories across the country. It's initiative from UNO libraries, archives and special collections. It was conceived of in late 2015 by students, faculty, staff and community members to address the under representation of LGBTQ plus folks and organization in not only UNO's archives, but also Omaha's archives. The spark that lit the fire was a visit to UNO by speaker Josh Berfer during LGBTQ History Month in which he gave a couple of presentations about queering history and another about queering archives, which included his own work establishing LGBTQ collecting initiatives and oral history projects that other universities he has worked at. So happily members of the community were very interested in supporting similar initiatives at UNO. Next slide. I wanna specifically acknowledge here the collaboration first of Dr. Jessie Hitchens. Jessie's the director of UNO's Gender and Sexuality Resource Center. Without her interest and address book, this initiative would not have started when or strongly as it did. So thanks to Jessie, we held an organizing and brainstorming meeting in the library at the end of 2015 and we actively began collecting historical material for the archives in a quiet phase in 2016 with student organizations. The creation of the collection was announced and then the collecting of personal papers and organizational records from greater Omaha community members then began in June of 2016. The core mission of the Queer Omaha Archives is to preserve and provide access to materials enduring value to legacy of LGBTQ plus folks in greater Omaha, which does include council bluffs, which for those of you who don't know, Omaha is separated from council bluffs, Iowa by the Missouri River. So they're right across the river there. This greater Omaha scope has, as we expected, actually expanded to cover pretty much all of Nebraska. And that happened very quickly for us, maybe a little quicker than we expected. The collection of meeting minutes, photographs, posters, scrapbooks, videos and so much more ensures the public can hear the underrepresented voices and learn more about LGBTQ plus history specific to the region's queer communities. This act of collecting materials, a testament to the past emission of these histories from our archives. So in archives, we need to listen for silences and sometimes we take action or seek others who may take action with or without us, the archives to address these silences. When records do not exist, the archives may have to see that they are created through our documentation or an initiative like our oral history project. So from that first year in organizing meeting about starting an archives, there was very passionate, I would say, interest in also launching an oral history initiative. In that conversation, I was very frank with the students, faculty, staff and community members in the room that this oral history project couldn't just be something I or other archivists just added on top of our existing duties. So we proposed doing it in one of two ways. First, we thought we could collect oral histories after the archives had raised private money so we could hire additional staff. And the second option we presented was to collaborate with a faculty member and their students or possibly in partnership with community members who would collect interviews for the archives working with the archives. So sociology professor, Dr. J. Irwin was immediately a booster for the archives in all ways including collecting the first oral histories. He consulted with me on creating an oral history project for his intro to LGBTQ studies course including the always important documentation having robust and inclusive biographical information forms and the appropriate signed agreements, good recording equipment, all those things we needed. The assignment had students working in pairs conducting an interview. During the spring and summer before the class was to run Dr. Irwin invested a lot of his time in creating a list of potential interviewees. He prioritized folks to interview to ensure that we had a diverse group of narrators. That's a trans band J absolutely understood the archivist's wishes to have the oral history interviews help to ensure that the voices of people of color, trans folks, non-binary folks and women were merely brought into the archives during its first year. So over the summer, J began contacting folks to ask if they were willing to be interviewed by his students in the fall. Next slide please. So as expected, some folks said yes, some said no and some didn't return J's calls or messages. One potential interviewee, a retired UNO Dean responded with a yes but sadly in this case the but was that Dean Shelton Hendricks was in the final stages of fighting cancer and he was in hospice and he would not be able to wait two months to be interviewed by students. As a result, the first interview collected for Omaha's LGBTQ plus archives was not collected by students but it came from the recording devices of J and myself spending a Saturday morning with Dr. Hendricks in his home with his husband and some of his children and grandchildren also dropping into the interview room. Dr. Hendricks passed away later that week. It was a beginning we had not imagined for the queer Omaha Archives oral history project. J students would go on to conduct 15 interviews in the fall semester. Unfortunately, immediately after the semester two interviewees asked me to not include their interview in the archives because they felt the students did a poor job. Fortunately, J and I knew both of these people. They were actually UNO faculty members who had been included on the interview list. This meant well that they may have had a poor impression of the students they worked with or the interview that they gave. That wasn't sort of immediately transferred to the university as a whole or to this new archives and oral history program we were getting off the ground. So later two narrators in this first group also asked to redo their interviews. The archives has only been able to redo these interviews within the last year because of the ongoing grant funding we've been receiving which I'll talk about in a couple of minutes. And I'll just say that while these hiccups with the student collected oral history interviews they were a little discouraging and disappointing. I wouldn't say that the rate was any higher than similar issues I've experienced when working with other classes that are collecting oral history interviews for the archives. So continuing forward, we are willing to again collect oral histories working with individual classes but only selectively. We've been much more focused on the archives has on raising money through grants and private gifts to employ our part-time oral history associate Luke Wagner to conduct interviews for the archives. The interviews conducted by our oral history associate are more in-depth, they can run much longer. He has more time to do more and better research and he also just now has much more experience conducting oral history interviews. So it turns out that relates to creates a more consistently positive experience for the narrators. And Luke also creates much better metadata for the archives, which as director of archives I really appreciate. So next slide. So more about Luke, beginning in fall 2017 we're able to leverage some small gifts from several individuals and local organizations to hire Luke to be our oral history associate. And we trained him on the job. We've called this grant project LGBTQ plus voices at the Queer Oma Archives Oral History Project and all interviews we're collecting under this initiative include this name in their metadata. And the grant funding we received was from Humanities Nebraska. So in addition to using the Humanities Nebraska grant funds to conduct oral histories, we also need to use a small slice of the funding for public programming. And since we knew our new oral history oral history associate Luke would need some training. We set up our public programming as a half day community workshop on how to do oral histories. And this was led by the wonderful oral or historian and archivist Jade Rogers from here in Omaha. We held this workshop the first year off campus at the University of contemporary art and it very successfully drew a diverse group of community members, students and faculty members. It may have actually even been scheduled on a football Saturday, which in Nebraska means that the grocery stores in most public places are empty because everyone's watching football, but people came to our workshops, so that was great. Starting in fall 2018, with those first interviews we were, as I mentioned before, prioritizing the voices of people of color, trans folks and women. Starting in the fall of 2018 rather, we also purposefully were trying to add more voices from folks who live outside of the Omaha metro area and outside of Lincoln. So trying to get some more rural voices into the collection, which we had a couple of, but we want some more. So next slide, please. So I'll just quickly go through the numbers on the interviews that we've collected and made available online to date. So 12 interviews were collected by Jay Irwin students in 2016 and are available. Two interviews that Jay himself collected are also available online. Since fall 2017, LGBTQ plus voices oral history associate Luke Wagner has collected and made available online 20 interviews. He has eight more interviews that are completed and in different stages of editing and the approval process with narrators right now. Three of those interviews are in a sort of a long term. We've been waiting to hear back from the narrators to give their final approval. And by long term, I mean it's been over a year since all of their interviews were completed. Luke asked me once, what do we do if they never give permission for us to make these interviews available online or to share even just within the library building, if not online. And I had explained that unfortunately if the narrators don't want to make the interviews available online or to anyone physically who comes to the building then no one will hear their words, which I realized was disappointing for Luke but that's the reality of doing oral histories. So that's where we're at with that. And then demographics of the 34 interviews that are available to the public to date. Eight have been with people of color, seven interviews were with trans folks, 16 interviews were with women and 10 interviews have been with white cis men. So an important part of our project is sharing the interviews as soon as the narrators are willing to do so. And so I'm gonna share with you our access points. So far to date, we've only had one person who's asked for a temporary restriction on any access to their interview. But that person did agree that we could list their name on the website. We just couldn't list any other metadata about their interview. So next slide please. So this is just a screenshot of the library's content DM site where we have a collection called the Unoral Histories and that's where all the LGBTQ voices oral histories are as well as other oral histories from the archives collection. So just to kind of give you a rundown of the metadata and what we have here. Luke writes detailed interview summaries. He also writes biographies of the narrators. He also writes a brief abstract. That's the one paragraph abstract at the top there. And then he also breaks the interview into timecode indices for encoding using the Ohm's application. Ohm's stands for oral history metadata synchronizer. Our digital initiatives librarian, Yumi Ohira and metadata coordinator, Angela Crager then upload the interview and it's metadata to its various platforms like content DM. And this is where folks can access the interviews online. So first all of our oral history interviews are described under content DM platform. This links the interview encoded with Ohm's the oral history metadata synchronizer. So it links to the public viewer for Ohm's which I'll show you in just a minute. So next slide then. For our queer Omaha archives we created a dedicated Ohm Mecca site before long before we opened in 2016. So along with regional and local newspapers, photos, flyers and other documents the oral history interviews are all available and described on this Ohm Mecca.net site. The Ohm Mecca.net site. This is just the front page of it. If you were to go into one of the item records here you would see the metadata would appear quite similar to how it looks on the content DM site. This metadata for each interview, the bio, the description, subject headings, et cetera will also be added to the finding aid for our LGBTQ oral history collection. And this is available in our University of Nebraska shared archives database. We have not yet uploaded all of that metadata to archive space because we're just getting through a archive space transition put that off for a couple of months but that will be there in the coming months as well. And so all of those link back to Ohm's. So next slide please. So here's what an interview, a completed interview looks like to the public in the Ohm's viewer. And this is where the library's various platforms content DM, Ohm Mecca and archive space all linked to. Ohm's allows the public to listen to LGBTQ voices interviews or in the case if we have a video interview they can watch the interview and then folks can follow along by segment they can jump to individual segments they can search for keywords here. Since these are audio recordings we did start asking narrators if they had a photo we could use on our website. We don't have those for everyone yet as you may have noticed on the earlier screens but here you can see this is sort of a strangely cropped photo of Kami Kavanaugh Rawlings. Unfortunately the Ohm's viewer sort of crops things its own way and we've let that go as sort of we look at it as a bit of artistic cropping happening here. But folks could choose whether or not they want to have a photo with their interview and then we're not taking photos of them we're letting them submit photos of their own. So I do need to note that unlike Larynda's project at UNK we are consciously not creating transcripts of LGBTQ plus voices interviews. This is for a few reasons. A big one is it is a big savings for us to not create the transcript. It saves us staff time, it saves us money and either paying an outside vendor to create the transcript or to pay our video hosting service to have AI create a transcript. We just feel that between this lovely detailed bio and interview summary that Luke is creating and that we're making available on the platforms paired with this time code index that gives the public lots of ways to enter into the interviews and to find the specific content that is of interest to the interviews. Because we're interviewing because we are doing these interviews and making almost all of them available to the public immediately. There's also sensitivity to privacy. If we were to do complete transcripts we would probably set it up so that they weren't being crawled by search engines and as a means of sort of a layer of privacy protection. So we just opted not to do transcripts. So next slide then. So to wrap up or to start to wrap up I guess our project is moving along but as with life there are challenges for LGBTQ plus voices. So money of course will likely continue to scramble for a couple thousand dollars here and there every year from various private sources, grant funding, private gifts to keep paying our oral history associates. We are hopeful about help for raising more money and in larger increments in the future. In the meantime I'll continue sending emails and letters and investing hours and preparing for online days of giving campaigns like the National Give Out Day Campaign coming up in April. So there's just a plug. If you wanna support our project you can go to the Give Out Day website or you can go directly to the University of Nebraska Foundation where we did very consciously back in 2016 create a dedicated fund for the Queer Omaha Archives believing that it was really important that this project have its own dedicated funding. Another issue for us is narrators. Especially useful to the archives is that Dr. Jay Irwin started that spreadsheet of folks for potential interviews before his class conducted interviews. And he was selecting names of people he knew. He was posting on his own social media looking for suggestions of people who should be interviewed and then asking friends in just kind of in casual conversation if they had suggestions or people to be interviewed. And that resulted in a list of about 70 local folks mostly from here in Omaha potential interviews. Some folks turned out to be unwilling and are able to sit down for interviews at the time. So Luke and I to a lesser extent have continued to add to this list of potential interviewees. And right now it's at over 150 people. Some of you again have said no and not just know for right now, but know forever but we'll continue adding to that list of narrators potential narrators. The next issue for us is that building trust takes time. I'm an outsider. Our history associate Luke, while he is a trans man from Omaha, he is younger. So we rely on the recommendations and referrals of community members to help us build trust and introduce folks to the project and to us. The incomparable Dominique Morgan from here in Omaha he's the executive director of an organization called Black and Pink. He's also an artist and community activist. He's enabled the archives to add two more interviews with people of color just by posting the link to his own interview on his social media and encouraging other folks to share their stories. So people, making friends and keeping them is really important to the project. And then finally, she'll just mention here is long-term continuation of collecting new interviews is an open issue for us. Collecting oral history interviews ourselves, like I said before, it's not a core function of our archives and special collections at UNL. And this past year or so oral histories have taken up a lot of time from several of us in the department as we work on two small grant projects, this and another one. And this attention or that level of attention is not something that we'll be able to sustain long-term. So thinking about the long-term future for this project and how we'll support it is definitely an ongoing issue for us. But I wanna close on, you know, mentioning some of the really good things or focus on the positive, I guess. So this project has been great community engagement. We would not have the diverse group of narrators we do without the work and referral of many community members, Dominique and others. Let's see, kind of a fun social media story. During LGBTQ History Month last fall, I posted a photo from an early Omaha pride parade on a Facebook group, a very active and busy Facebook group for Omaha History Buffs. We heard from several folks commenting on that post who were interested in being interviewed or donating material to the collection. And so Luke has actually been able to interview two of those people so far and he's working on editing those interviews now. So that's been really exciting. You know, we try to be opportunistic. When we heard from folks in Lincoln last year that they were interested in this oral history project, even though we're an Omaha focused collection, we seized on that excitement and interest and conducted several interviews with folks from Lincoln, which are now available online. I do wanna note, I did talk to my colleague, Mary Ellen Ducey at UNL, before diving into those interviews to make sure we weren't stepping on any toes. Similarly, I'd previously made contact with some folks at Wayne State College about the archives. And so reached out to them and asked if they had any referrals of local folks who might wanna be interviewed. So Luke's in the process of planning to do two, at least two, maybe three interviews with folks up in Wayne, which I've never been there, but it's a couple hours north of Omaha. So we'll be going there hopefully when it's springtime in Nebraska, whenever that may come this year. Next, you know, this has brought some wonderful public attention for us. And this has been in news stories, talks with community members and student organizations and other presentations. And finally, I just wanna say a really important thing about this project, LGBTQ Voices, is that the archives is addressing one of our archival silences in the collection. I believe I'm a realist and as a realist, I know the archives will never be complete, but we're always seeking and this is just part of our continuing collaborations and hopefully our growth. So thank you. Great, okay. Thank you, Amy and LaRinda. This is really great, hearing all about what you're doing with the oral histories, both very important areas and projects that you're doing and still have lots of work to do, of course. And it's so interesting that you mentioned there, if anybody does have any questions, I'll say first, anyone out in the audience has any questions, type them into the questions section of your GoToWebinar interface and monitoring that here. And I can pass on your questions to Amy or LaRinda. So go ahead and do that if you have any questions. But Amy, first, I was actually interested, it's kind of funny. When you started talking about right at the end there about people from Lincoln contacting you and then reaching out to, you know, on Wednesday, I was actually writing a note to myself to ask you about queer, the queer Omaha archives in general, is it not limited to Omaha? Would you be expanding into elsewhere? So you must have been reading my mind there. And I was wondering about that anyways myself, that the fact that it is called the queer Omaha archives, but is there any thoughts, and I know you're just talking about limitations of time and staff and funding and whatnot, of making like a queer Nebraska archive or is that like way down the road to some other point? Yeah, so that was something, you know, I think just based on my experience with similar projects at other institutions before I came to UNO, when we had that first meeting with stakeholders. And I said, you know, we need to focus what we're doing to start. We don't want to, I mean, they say we're the Nebraska LGBTQ archives, because that would imply we have the resources to go out to Western Nebraska. And for those of you who may be watching who are not from Nebraska, it's like what, an eight hour drive across the state or something? To get end to end. Yeah, yeah. About 70 hours, just one way. Yeah, and I'm at the very eastern end. So yeah, and so there was the reality of we need to focus this collection to start, which we could make a success of it here in Omaha and then expand out. And that would give me time also to talk to my colleagues in Lincoln and other places. And that expansion out just happened a bit faster than I initially expected. Just because they reached out to you. You said to Lincoln, I feel people wanted to do that. I did, I reached out to them as well, but their enthusiastic response was, I was, it was unexpected. The Wayne State folks, they had reached out to me about the archives, not the oral history part, but just the archives. And because they have a student group and what I want to come talk to the student group about archives and the importance of preserving material. And so when we thought about expanding the project this year, I said, oh, I already know these people up in Wayne. So, and they were great about suggesting several community members for potential interviews. And if any of you are listening from other parts of Nebraska and you or someone you know may want to do an interview, please contact me. Absolutely, yeah. That's a question you said you had reached out to people at Lincoln UNL to make sure you weren't stepping on toes. So, so far there aren't any other archive projects focused on this in Nebraska, like officially yet. Yeah, not that I'm aware of. So we're, we're very happy to be the Nebraska LGBTQ Archives, but for now we are the Omaha. Right, yeah, we gotta start with what you can do of course, absolutely. And I'll let everyone know, and I'll show you this later too. Amy actually was on Encompass Live previously talking just about the queer Omaha archives in general. And so we have the ARC recording of that available on our website that you can go and watch. Yeah, I'll just say as a disclaimer, that was from like literally the month after we went public. It was like back in 2016. It is, yeah, we might do an update on that maybe. Sure, we had some collections then, but we hadn't started oral histories and the collection has grown and involved a lot since then. We should definitely have you on again to update what's happened for the entire archives. Sure, sure. Yeah, so, Lerinda, a question for you. Amy talked about some of her participants doing the interviews, but then not wanting to have it shared. Have you had the same kind of issues with your? We've been really lucky. We have not. Everybody's been pretty enthusiastic. One thing I've heard a couple of people say is someone cares about our stories. That must mean we matter. Yeah, which the first time someone said that, wow. So generally we have not had anyone back out. I know my two collaborators, we've been talking a little bit about the one person who is undocumented and lives in a very small town where they may be the only Latino family. So we're talking a little bit about how we wanna treat that on our website and things like that. Both of your projects are very important and brings what you said, Lerinda. If they wanna hear our stories, this is great. We matter and people want to listen to what we have to say. So let's get it out there, but there is also the dangerous side of all of this for everyone on both of your projects just because of the way things are unfortunately right now, so yeah. I'm glad you guys are very aware that you've done an awesome job, I have to say at this, that it's walking that delicate line and giving a lot of the ownership to the participants themselves. Absolutely, and we're actually hosting an LGBTQ symposium on campus here and I'm involved in that. And so we had had some people say, hey, can we videotape the student panels? And I kind of went, yeah, no. Yeah, we'd have to ask all of them if they want to and yeah. Right, so I mean, we're certainly talking with them, one of those is being put together by QSA on campus, the Queer Straight Alliance to see whether they'd be interested in doing something along the lines, working with maybe some of the same materials that Amy's used to get started or seeing how we can work together to capture some of those because there is interest in capturing some of these voices, especially in the very rural kind of in the middle of nowhere context of being where we are versus Omaha. Right, right. All right, so another question. Amy, you had talked about getting comments from your participants, the ones who did the interviews about the students not having done a very good job at their, which I hadn't thought about it, that would be an issue, but the students they're new to this too potentially. And so I didn't know, Lorinda, did you have a similar situation with yours? Did anyone, I mean, comment about it? Or people that you mentioned, Amy, where it was the faculty who are, you know, they're possibly expecting more? Possibly, yeah. On the encounter, I don't know. Then just like me, I wouldn't know if someone did a good job or not. I'm just, you know, conversation. Yeah, we didn't have any comments from the interviewees. We did find we had student videographers do, I think just two or three of them. And we're not sure that those will be usable in any broader projects just because of some of the technical flaws we did. Yeah. But, you know, we haven't had any participants come back to us and complain, but again, we're dealing with a different population who maybe doesn't have a lot of connections with academia, might not know or think that Amy could complain. Yeah, it is what it is, yeah. I don't know. I wonder to the students that we, that did the Orangutri project, they had shared questions, they developed together, so they were all asking their narrators the same maybe five or six questions. But then they had room to ask other questions based on the bio sheet and that sort of thing. And I looked at, and then I was looking at, you know, Larynda's slide where you had, you know, several more questions. So maybe that there was just a better structure around what Larynda students were asking versus what our students were asking. Yeah, take a look at what was being asked, yeah. Did you both give the questions ahead of time to your interviewees or was it all just on the fly them thinking of answer, like were they given a heads up of what would be asked? Generally, no, we prefer not to give interviewees questions ahead of time. Just, we'll give them more of a broad outline. These are the sorts of topics we'd like to talk about just because if you get, they get the exact questions. Some of them will sit down and prepare, prepare, which can lead to some very, very canned sounding for our students. You don't want them to be presenting a speech to you. You want it to be more from the heart in an actual. Yeah, I mean, neither do we want to traumatize them either, so, generally we want to make sure they know what they're getting into when they go in, but yeah. In Newea's case, we don't give them the exact questions in advance either, but with the interviews that Luke Wagner, our history associate does, he does a very detailed pre-interview with the narrators. So as part of that pre-interview process, he's explaining what the oral history will look like and the processing of it, but then also there's a detailed biographical questionnaire that's asking about friends, family, jobs, education, how you spend your time, and some of that is prepping people for the questions they will be asked. And then he's sort of seeding some content from them. So what organizations have they been involved with and especially when you're interviewing someone who is in their 20s, there's a certain amount of content there versus someone who's in their 60s or 80s. So that pre-interview process is helpful in getting people to think about things that have happened in the past. I think it's good to give them a little bit of that perhaps so they're kind of at least know. Yeah. And I think that little pre-interview kind of, like you said, will give them the idea of, well, they're asking me this ahead of time, that's probably the kind of things we'll be chatting about in more detail later. Yeah. And that pre-interview also gives space for the narrator to say, I'm very happy to talk about my adult life. I don't want to talk about my childhood or I don't want to talk about my church or my job or whatever it might be. Right, right, absolutely. Cool. All right, does anybody else have any other questions? Take them into the questions section and we can get them answered. If you don't want to ask anything now, that's okay. You can reach out to both Amy and Linda at their respective universities for more information about their two projects or if you are someone, or you know of someone who might want to be involved in their projects to be interviewed, I'm sure you're looking for many more voices to have. Always, yep. It doesn't look like anybody's typed in any more last minute questions. We're just about to 11 o'clock here central time. So I think we can start wrapping things up. Do you guys have anything, any last words you want to say first? No, I don't think so. Just thank you for doing this. Yeah, thank you so much for having you guys both on. Both of you will join me. I love this technology here. Like I said, three different cities across the state didn't matter that we had a huge snowstorm last night. We're all here. So that will wrap it up for the presentation. I am going to pull presenter control back to my screen. We're all here. There we go. I'll switch over here first. There we go. So this is for today's show. It has been recorded and will be on our main site. This is our Encompass Live webpage here. If you do Google Encompass Live, the name of our show, so far we are the only thing called that, yay. Nobody else call themselves this please. And you will come to our website or to our archives. These are our upcoming shows, but today's show, the archive will be right here on our Archive Encompass Live shows link at the bottom. This is all of the shows we've had previously, as I said. The video, let's see here's one from last week. There's video, she had a presentation and a handout will all be there available. And both Amy and LaRinda, if you're willing to send me, if you've got your presentation links somewhere out there, we can share those as well. Absolutely. When we get to the archive. And I mentioned that Amy was on the show before. Let's see if I do a search here. We do have a search here now. We have this, these are the archives for Encompass Live. We're at the beginning of our 11th year of the show. So this is our archive going all the way back. And if you notice, things are dated. So when you are looking for things in here, pay attention to the date. That when it was actually presented live the first time, some of the things in here will be old information, products or services don't exist anymore. I think they've changed as Amy mentioned. We did have her on the show, but if we do our search here, we'll find that, not do it right, let's res again. There we are. Was in 2016, July, 2016 was when she was on previously talking about it. So keep that in mind when you watch the show it's at the very beginning. And we'll try and get Amy on again as we're just chatting about to see an update on the entire archives maybe later this year. But you can search our entire archives or you can limit it to just the most recent year's worth if you want to just have more up-to-date information from any of the archives here. Anyone that attended today's show live or preregistered for today's show will get an email from me letting you know when the recording is available. Should be maybe sometime tomorrow. Also, we will post onto our various social media, Twitter or Facebook that we use. Here at Encompass Live, we do have a Facebook page that I've opened up over here. So if you are a big Facebook user, please do give us a like. We do post announcements about new shows that are coming up. Here's your reminder this morning to log in for today's show. Information about the previous shows are here. Wow, there we go. Here's announcing when the recording of last week's show is available. So if you do like to use Facebook to keep up on things please do give us a like over there. And I hope we join us for next week's Encompass Live which will be about Future Ready Nebraska and the digital learning and ed tech plan. Future Ready Nebraska, this is for our pre-K through 12 teachers, their Future Ready Nebraska project for digital learning and what we're doing here in Nebraska. So if you wanna get an update on that during AV who is from the Nebraska Department of Education will be with us on the show. So please do sign up for that at any of our other future shows we have coming up here in the schedule. One last thing I do want to remind everyone about that this Friday is our Big Talk from Small Libraries online conference. This is our online conference where we have presenters from small and rural libraries from all across the country. We do this as an annual thing here that we host through the Nebraska Library Commission in conjunction with the Association for Rural and Small Libraries, ARSL, if you're part of them. And it is this Friday morning at starts at 9 a.m. central time. We go away to 5 p.m. We have a full schedule here of presenters every hour, every hour or at the mean time we have lightning rounds, five different 10 minute sessions. We will also have the library who is the best small library in America 2018, Madison County Public Library, Shawna Brice from their library will be talking about that award that they won. Well, with a whole bunch of other great speakers. So if you're interested in what our small library is, the small rural libraries across the country have been doing, this is not a Nebraska thing. This is a national thing. So we've got speakers, I think, from seven or eight different states throughout the day. So please do sign up and register for our big talks and small libraries. Registration page is right there. Other than that, that wraps it up for this morning. Thank you very much for attending on it. And I'm gonna go back to our Encompass Live page. There we go. There we go. So thank you very much for attending this morning. Thank you very much, Amy and Lauren, for being with me today. And I hope we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye.