 Good afternoon. I'm Leanne George, coordinator of the spec survey program at the Association of Research Libraries, and I'd like to thank you for joining us for the second in a series of spec survey webcasts. Today, we're going to hear from the authors of the survey on community-based collections, and the results of this survey have been published in spec kit 347. But before I begin, I have just a few announcements. First, everyone but the presenters has been muted to cut down background noise. So if you are part of a group today, feel free to speak among yourselves. You won't disturb anybody. We do want you to join the conversation by typing questions in the chat box in the lower left corner of your screen. At the end of the presentation, we will read the questions aloud before answering them so everyone can hear what the questions are. This webcast is being recorded, and we will send registrants the slides and a link to the recording in the next week. Now, let me introduce our presenters. Our survey authors are from the University of Florida. Lourdes is the exhibit coordinator at the George Smathers Libraries. Jessica is the volunteer coordinator and Rebecca is the intake coordinator for the Panama Canal Museum collection. Sophia is associate director of the Centers for the Humanities and the Public Sphere. There's one other survey author, Margarita Vargas Betancourt, who's a Caribbean basin librarian and she's unable to join us today. You'll notice in the lower right-hand corner of the screen there's a hashtag, use this hashtag, ARL, spec kit 347 to continue the conversation with the survey authors on Twitter. Sophia is going to begin with a discussion of what community-based collections are and why they're relevant. Sophia, over to you. Thank you, Leigh Ann. It's a pleasure to speak with everyone today. I hope everyone is well. Good afternoon and good morning to those on the West Coast. So community-based collections, why are they relevant? What are they? One of the fundamental characteristics of any human society, human group, subgroup, etc., is that they engage in what we call collective memory work. Humans join together to collect materials that document their experiences and the narrative of who they are, why they're there, and how they want to be remembered. These kinds of collections are often deeply personal. They're based in the communities who gather them. They include all kinds of materials, material objects and documents, but also traditions and stories. And these are items that will often be found in various different places, libraries, museums, archives, perhaps galleries, but together they may challenge what any of these Linn institutions considers as a collection. I often think about the cabinet of curiosities model from the Renaissance, this idea of a kunstkammer or an assortment of items that people gather to document their daily lives. So community-based collections are important because they are an active part of remembering who we are as individuals and as societies. Now, we became interested in the topic of community-based collections because it's a really exciting territory for research libraries to be working in. As on the slide here, you'll see a quote from the IMLS Strategic Plan, its second goal. It says that museum and libraries can be strong anchors that enhance civic engagement, cultural opportunities, and economic vitality. And with a community-based collection, a museum or library is not merely a home for scholars, but it is exactly this. It's a strong community anchor that supports ongoing cultural heritage work and education for a community. Now, as you can see from our spec kit bibliography, we really read far and wise to gather information on this topic. We didn't find a lot of research on a community-based collection as a specific entity. But this second reading here on the slide by Delav Coen Gottlieb is a good starter, I think, for somebody interested in this topic. They talk about, in their article, the give and take of a community-based collection. The idea that a library has an opportunity to learn a lot about a community, but in this instance, a community also has an opportunity to learn a lot about a library. So the give and take of community-based collections raises a whole host of really interesting issues that we wanted to explore in our spec kit. Now, when we thought about what a community-based collection was, we thought about it in terms of the larger context of library archive and museum partnerships. The American Association of Museums, as I'm sure many of us know here in the webinar, has done significant research looking at the pressures facing museums and small cultural institutions. And they have found in recent reports that the most recent 21st century economic downturn has really strongly affected a number of small museums in particular. So the AAM posits that when an accredited museum is faced with retrenchments or downsizing, that it really has two options. It can close, but more positively, it can think about forming partnerships or integrations with other kinds of entities. So put this way, we really think about a community-based collection as a partnership, a partnership between expert groups, groups with lay expertise and groups with professional expertise that come together to document and steward a community's history and heritage. So again, we're really left with more questions than answers. We wonder to what extent do these kinds of partnerships happen, how often are libraries involved in them, where are they happening, and what spectrum of activities may help to facilitate these kinds of partnerships between museums and libraries and archives and heritage community-based organizations. That's the big context of the spec kit. Now, we also have a more immediate context, and this is a very deeply personal topic to us here at the University of Florida because in 2012, the Smathers Libraries here at US married the Panama Canal Museum. The Panama Canal Museum, and in this marriage, it created the Panama Canal Museum Collection. You can read more about this in the spec kit itself, that this is the collection that the University of Florida chose to use as the model when it responded to the spec kit survey. The Panama Canal Museum Collection was created by former residents of the Panama Canal Zone, which is no longer in existence, to document the American era of the Panama Canal. It was largely a volunteer run museum, but it had an aging community and sustainability concerns, which led to an external consultant proposing that the museum integrate with another entity. And the US libraries, where my colleagues are based, was very pleased to have received an IMLS leadership grant to document the process of merging these two institutions. It was the first time a heritage museum had ever merged with a public academic research library. So this has been a really fruitful voyage for all of us here. But again, we have questions. We wonder, how did the experiences that we've had here with this community based collection relate to the activities and learnings at other ARL member institutions? Does our case study reflect broader trends or not? Et cetera, et cetera. So we were quite pleased to have this opportunity through the spec kit survey to learn about broader practices in this area across the ARL. So we designed the survey to gather a number of bits of information that spans the life cycle of a community based collection, acquisition and background of the collection, discovery, stewardship for the collection, but also for the community, because a community based collection brings with it a community. Volunteering, processing, outreach, assessment, satisfaction, et cetera. In other words, our spec kit survey sought to gather quantitative information about the logistics of running and managing a community based collection. But we also asked for a lot of qualitative feedback about the fuzzier aspects of doing this collective memory work, the relationship building, maintaining engagement and satisfaction. And I know that I speak for all of my colleagues here and Leanne and her team with the ARL spec kit that we are so deeply grateful to all of the respondents who took part in the survey. And we look forward to continuing the conversation with you. So I will now pass this on to my colleague, Rebecca, who will describe the responding institutions. Hello, everyone. Before my co-presenters go into more detail about our survey findings regarding some of the rewards, challenges and practices that arise when working with community based collections, I'm going to provide a brief overview of the collections and the related management practices at the responding institutions. We asked our participants to identify one community based collection within their holdings that fit into the definition outlined in the survey introduction and use this collection to guide their responses. The definition we provided read, community based collections are those that have been amassed not by one individual but by a collective, which may take the form of a museum, ethnic or cultural organization or other diaspora group active in the documentation of its past. Often these collections are emotional in that they speak to the community's heritage and identity. Of the 48 institutions that answered the survey, a few chose several distinct collections to report on generating 55 total responses. The responses were complex and rich assessments of the reasons for acquiring these collections, community stewardship or partnership, and the associated workload and management tactics. Notably 19 respondents indicated that their library has no community based collections and of the remaining 36 responses, the majority of the libraries indicated that they have only one or two of these types of collections. So what kinds of communities are being represented in these holdings? We asked our respondents to select all of the major characteristics that unite the community that their collection represents. A shared interest or affinity group was selected most often and can be seen in examples such as the Cornell hip hop collection or the Canadian women's movement collection at the University of Ottawa. Social groups for the second most common selection, followed by ethnic groups and geographic locations, professional organizations, political organizations, and religious organizations. Respondents also wrote in other defining characteristics with examples including gender, sexuality, and disaster-based archives. We asked to indicate all of the forces that drove the decision to acquire the community-based collection. Not surprisingly, the most common response was existing expertise or holdings within the library. The second most common answer was aging of the community with a number of respondents specifically adding to the comments section that this is creating an imminent danger of history artifacts and personal or community memory being lost. This urgency of documentation was also echoed in a different sense by one respondent who wrote, we needed to collect the history as it was happening on our doorstep as memorials, community meetings, protests, and rallies were taking place. There was not a system in place to capture this history as it was happening. I think both of these comments about the immediacy of collecting indicate a heightened sensitivity to viewing history as something living, unfolding, and in need of both preservation and interaction. Additional driving factors for acquiring community collections include conflicts of threats to the physical materials, conflicts of threats to community stability, and economic difficulties. Among other forces that were cited in the comments, it's also worth noting here that several collection acquisitions were either driven by a university administrator's mandate or by a timely strategic partnership, and then a few were also driven by the approach of major anniversaries of specific events of importance within the community. Looking at the information provided about when libraries acquired or started to build their collections, we see that the vast majority of those reported on were added within the last 25 years. Further, when asked, do you anticipate acquiring more community-based collections in the future, 54% of respondents replied, yes, there is an increasing need for libraries to do so, with another 23% indicating that active discussions or negotiations are already in progress? Considering that most respondents indicated currently having between zero and two community-based collections, there seems to be a trend toward incorporating these types of holdings into the library and a relatively widespread enthusiasm for doing so. Management of many of the reported collections requires working closely with communities or specific community members, but it's also clear from the data that the responding libraries still assume the bulk of responsibilities for daily operations, events, and interpretation. When asked to select all of the groups working with the collection, the responses show that across the board, most respondents are using a team of internal library professionals to handle processing, reference, interpretation, and other activities such as outreach. A few responses indicate the community volunteers are working in such roles, but not in high numbers. It is also worth noting here that libraries reported having the bulk of financial responsibility for the community-based collection, with 78% of libraries solely responsible, and another 17% sharing this responsibility with the community organization. So that was a quick overview of our survey respondents' community-based collections, but I really do encourage you to check out the spec kit, because there's a lot of really detailed information in the expensive comments that people left related to the composition, the processing, communication, and all kinds of internal workings related to these collections. So next, I'm going to hand off the phone to Lourdes, who's going to describe community stewardship practices. Thank you. Thank you, Rebecca. So what happens once you receive the collection? There's a lot of different activities that we found take place in order to not only sustain the collection, but also to sustain the community and keep them involved and engaged. So stewarding that affiliated community is an integral part of managing the collection, and the survey responses indicate that the libraries are in fact gearing away from very formal, regularly scheduled structures, such as advisory councils, and instead are favoring very casual methods, such as informal meetings or sustaining ongoing personal relationships. Email and in-person ad hoc one-on-one meetings are the most commonly reported methods of communicating with community members. So we have found that very much it is a community-based collection and those personal relationships are really what is the driving factor to keeping that community involved and engaged, and everyone feeling very satisfied with the partnership. So another integral part of that is the volunteerism associated with that. The survey found that despite expressing a desire to do so, most of the responding libraries, 28 respondents or roughly 78% of them, they are not retaining any members of the affiliated community as volunteers with the collection, and this may be for a variety of reasons. 17 respondents or 46% indicated that they are using non-community volunteers. In their comments, respondents noted that the non-community volunteers tend to be students or interns, which are readily available on academic campuses. They are most commonly involved in collections, processing, and care activities, while the community volunteers, when they are utilized, are more often involved in metadata creation or enhancement. This taps the subject expertise of the community, while also utilizing the widely available students that are on campus. So donor relations are also extremely important to community-based collections, not only donation of materials, but also donation of financial resources. And much like historical societies, some community-based collections may opt to create collection-specific memberships that maintain the close ties of the community to the materials, although the majority of them do not. 32 respondents have no annual membership or friend affiliation associated with the community-based collection, but they do encourage private donations. Of those private donations, only about half of the respondents publicly recognize monetary donations, typically in the way of a published list of donors' name in an annual report-type publication. Engagement with the collection varies, but milestones of community engagement are, although quite varied, they're very much tied and very similar. The most common ones are landmark events that include exhibitions, special events or lectures, as well as the initial acquisition of the collection and digitization of all or part of the collection materials. These are all activities that we found are very significant to the community members. It honors the collection as well as more broadly publicizes its new home and its further use. Most of the institutions reported stable or increased in-person use of the collection after its acquisition, and several respondents noted that visitation fluctuates near anniversaries or significant dates within the collection and or community. In-person use by the affiliated community may see a decrease, though, due to members' age or other factors affecting the size and strength of that community. Limited or non-existent physical space has helped increase online collection usage for about half of the collections that responded since their acquisition. Next, Jessica will discuss the rewards and challenges of supporting these collections and their associated endeavors. All right. Thank you, Lourda. So we noticed that the rewards of working on a community-based collection were very similar to the rewards that one might expect to experience with really any collection. For the most part, they were very tied to professional satisfaction. Of course, we find satisfaction in preserving materials. That's a major driving force of our profession. So those numbers make a lot of sense. We also find it rewarding to increase access to a collection, to work with students, and to shine a light of representation on a perhaps otherwise ignored or underrepresented part of our human experience. So the most commonly reported rewards were those relating to any part of the relationships with the community. Those included all of the new, existing, expanded, or just improved relationships within the community that was represented in the collection. So as far as the challenges, we noticed two big things in the data about our challenges. The first is that there was a much more diverse response here. Many different types of challenges were reported. And of those, most were pretty logistical in nature, whereas the rewards are sort of big picture things like serving students and increasing access. The reported challenges tended to be smaller, more specific things. So those challenges are also what you might expect. They are the types of challenges we face with many of our collections. I mean, really, who doesn't need more funding, right? Whereas the rewards tended to be very big picture things, you can see that this list becomes more kind of nitty gritty with things like copyright issues and software problems. So this spec kit could serve as a great tool for those considering taking on a community based collection, because the message here in the rewards and the challenges is very clear, you're going to need more dedicated staff and more space. Space is an issue for a lot of special collections, and that may or may not be tied specifically to community based collections. However, staff time was the second most commonly reported challenge, as combined with challenges of donor relations, conflicting perspectives, and often between the community and the library. And many of the comments we received, it may be reasonable to say that much of the staff time is needed to interact with the community. So working with a community is both rewarding and challenging. But of course, you already knew that there are rewards and challenges to any project. The interesting part is that community relationships were reported as both the most rewarding and most challenging element in managing a community based collection. Still, it was reported more frequently as a reward than a challenge. So if your institution is weighing the pros and cons of partnering with a community, you may want to consider the words of the great Jimmy Dugan, because in this case, the data supports that it is, in fact, the hard that makes it great. Well, thank you, Lordess, and Jessica, and Kofia, and Rebecca, and let's take your questions now. Please join the conversation by typing your question in the chat box in the lower left corner of your screen. And then we will read the questions allowed and answer them as they come in. Take a minute here to give you time to type, and then we'll start the Q&A. Let's start with this question while the rest of you are typing. So why are research libraries well positioned to be homes for these types of collections and taking on these communities? I think that research libraries are particularly well positioned to work with these communities because they often have resources available that I suppose, particularly if we're dealing with smaller heritage communities or small community organizations, there's often resources that the library has that those communities or those individuals or those organizations don't necessarily have. Things like often digitization processes that help to make those materials available online and help a much broader community discover to discover aspects of that community that they would like to have available for study or available for public consumption in different ways. We talk about funding, of course, being an issue at every library, but very often there is at least a higher degree of funding available to a library to help very often maintain and preserve a collection, of course, because it's part of the mandate of any collection you take that you'll be able to care for them into the foreseeable future. And that's not always the case with smaller organizations or individual community members. So, well, again, there's not a huge financial pool of money that's necessarily available. There is at least the ability to help with preservation and proper care and maintenance of those. Do you guys have other thoughts about particular? I would actually say that a broader dissemination is really one of the strong suits that an academic library brings. They normally have a much broader audience, I would say, than the dedicated community. Often the communities are very insular and they keep their materials and the people who know about those materials are also community members or maybe a very specific dedicated scholar here and there. But having the materials available in an academic institution like this broadens that up to a much wider audience, not only through digitization and more broad distribution, but just the presence of scholars on campus, students on campus who have this available as a new research resource. And therefore, more people know about the community, about those issues and about that history that, if not, may be very much closed off to anyone outside the community. We have several good follow-up questions coming in. Let me read one of them. Did anyone have a response to the survey mention a partnership that kept materials with the community in a local archive, for example? Off the top of my head, I don't believe so, but it's an excellent question that we would have to actually refer back to the spec kit. I still believe so, but I do think that a few of the responding institutions kept the materials in very close partnership with the community. So it is still a partnership and not so much a donation of material. I can't remember the specific name of the collection now from the spec kits, but there were instances of the selection being housed in a museum or with a local cultural resource center that was located near the library. And so the physical items were not moved, even though the owners have been care of those items that experienced a change. Another related question to what you were saying about preserving the collection. Anne asks, would an institution have the practice of digitizing the collection, but not keeping the physical pieces? And I will say, actually, we have the very personal example. The University of Florida, before having the Panama Canal Museum collection, would be the perfect example for that. We have a large digitization facility that is part of the library, and we would regularly digitize textiles for the Campus Art Museum. But we were not caring for any of these textiles. We did not have the expertise to house them. But once we received the Panama Canal Museum collection, it came with a substantial amount of textiles that all of a sudden we went back to our previous partnerships with the Campus Art Museum and tried to gain some insights on how to best care for the physical materials. We thought we had a good footing on how to digitize them and make them available, but how to safeguard the physical original was a tougher sell for us. And I would imagine that quite a few of the other institutions could probably have similar examples of things like that. We have another question from Karen asking, how frequently does it occur that the libraries become aware of collections and the library reaches out to the holders of the collections that might be at risk and offers to take care of them? We don't have a, I'd love to be able to give you a percentage in response to that good question. We don't have it, but if you look through the, one of the questions the spec kit asked was, tell us your acquisition story and the circumstances around it. And just looking through that now, we see a variety of stories, several of which are things such as special collections became aware of this collection and sense that perhaps it was not sustainable and reached out to the community, et cetera. In other instances, it was somebody representing the community that came to the library. So it happens in all ways, whether we could speak to the frequency, it's certainly perhaps not the dominant way that collections happen, but it is a significantly large path for these community-based collections to form. You talked about the rewards and challenges a little bit, but can you say some more about how traditional typical library practices get stretched when they acquire these types of collections? So I think they get stretched in different ways, and that is not a blanket, kind of always every academic institution will have the same stretching, let's say. But the presence of lay expertise, I feel that that's a different way of operating for many traditional librarians, in fact, having expertise that is not research-based, but rather your living history type of thing, it's not as common in librarian background, so to speak, as well as close partnerships with a community involving them as stakeholders in decision making. I feel that is something that public libraries certainly seem to do better, and not better that they do it better, but maybe have more experience doing it, whereas academic libraries usually have their campus community, their students, and they're accustomed to that, but having other types of communities and involving them in decision making or strategic plans may be a challenge for them, figuring out how to do it. The diverse types of materials that we talked about would certainly be a stretch for some special collection, housing something that is not a manuscript, that is not a book, that's not a photograph, could be seen as a stretch, new talents to learn and add to your resume. As well as new kinds of shelving. The other thing we heard in the spec kit is people seem to be, libraries seem to be engaging in more item level descriptions of items when they're being digitized, when they're being made available, etc., because individual items, individual photographs, have unique importance for communities in a way that isn't the case for a research scholar who might be happy to come and find it useful to sort through a box of things that aren't item level described. And I would say actually to add upon that just the description of items, how to describe something could be seen quite a stretch for academic institutions for special collection in particular, how do you talk about a t-shirt, how do you talk about a little bit uniform, there's the changing subject heading terminology to use and again going back to the lay expertise, the lay term that then would probably be, the materials would be better suited by using the lay terminology in order to continue to allow that community to access the items, they may not be looking for what the library wants to apply as a subject heading, so that also has caused some stretching. What are the most typical kinds of items in these collections and what are some of the most unusual for a library collection? While Lordeus is looking up the specific number in the spec kit, I think we found that quite a lot of it, both in our collection from the Panama Canal Museum collection and in the survey results, is that quite a large portion of it was photographic. I think after that it was document, but I have actually found it. Thank you, Jessica. Most, as Jessica said, very much so. The majority is photographs, manuscripts and newspapers are all about, even with the amounts, and that's very, very typical and in line for special collections, academic institutions. After that follows books, again, things we, we all feel we know how to house. After books then is where it becomes a little, a little stretchier, a little iftier. Oral histories, artifacts, and artwork follow that with a digital format, such as video games, websites, databases, and common textiles, what I was referring to, t-shirts, hats, uniforms. A small percentage have religious objects and other types of textiles. And several respondents also noted in having miscellaneous other ephemeral materials as well. I think really the interesting thing related to that is the question about whether, whether to house the printed materials, the books, the manuscripts, away from the archival materials. And we found that it's roughly divided in half, about half are separating them and about half are not. And this could be for a variety of reasons, and faith being one of the primary ones. We have a quick question here from Joseph, who wanted to know if the spec kits available online. And it is, you can see the spec kit at the ARL Digital Publications website, that's publications.arl.org. And the table of contents and the executive summary from the survey are freely available, endowed loadable to everyone. And then the complete spec kits available for purchase, or if you're a subscriber, you should have IP access to it. A follow-up question about the collections, how does oral history fit into the work of community based collections? Do you collect them before, during, or after? Well, in our case with the Panama collection, it's a little bit of everything. There were some that were already a part of the collection when we took it on. I think the majority of the collection of oral history has happened during the project itself, because it's typically going to be the libraries that have the resources, the technology to capture those. As far as after? Oh, after the acquisition of it, there's some, certainly. There was one responding institution that spoke about oral history work as an opportunity for engagement of the community. And so they spoke about oral history work later on in the spec kit survey. So if you're interested in this theme, read the engagement sections of the spec kit as well. We do have time for a few more questions. Go ahead and send those in. Then there's a new question here. How do you wing communities away from the project? Do you agree to work with them indefinitely? Or is there an endpoint? I think that's something that, you know, we certainly, we don't address it in the spec kit. It wasn't one of the questions, but that's something that I think needs to be addressed at the beginning if there's, you know, a formal MOU or a need of gift kind of thing. And I think at some point, depending on the type of community, if it's a heritage community and active community, the engagement level does sort of wax and wing, depending on, as we said, you know, milestone community anniversaries, certainly that draws them back in. And then it may be quite close a bit and jumps back again for the next big event. You know, it depends. It depends really what the community is and what the mission is of the institution housing and what, what are we really promising to do? You know, are we promising to keep the materials and stuff in at the year? Are we promising to keep them on as partners? Are they donors? It's really, it's a lot of different things to, to decide kind of from the get go. It's certainly not something that I would recommend figuring out as you go. I see another question. Why would one want to do the weaning? And certainly the idea that weaning is something appropriate to happen with a community-based collection partnership seems to vary based on a variety of factors of the institutions responding to the survey, in particular, the staffing structures for the community based collections. It seems that community-based collections that were staffed with dedicated curators, some of these individuals described themselves in the, in the spec kit as rogue curators, they, the weaning wasn't an issue. It was about preserving this ongoing relationship with a community to continue to build the collection, to continue to leverage these forms of expertise, but together make the community and the institution stronger. So whether weaning is, is or is not relevant depends on a variety of factors, one of which is staffing. One last question. Anyone? So how many communities can a university really support because you do make it sound very labor intensive? Did you have any recommendations or or experiences from the survey respondents? Some, some institutions I know responded having multiple community based collection, and I think it really depends, you know, again, staffing and financial issues, but how, how diverse are those communities from the university's mission? I mean, if it's something that the university is already very closely tied to, it's certainly much easier to sustain and support these communities. If it's something that is already present, say, and in another collection, as is the case for us at University of Florida, where we had existing collections that would benefit from the Panama Canal Museum collection, and vice versa, again, it's much easier to support. If you have multiple competing communities, I, I don't know how easy it would be, and we do not have the data about it, but it would be, it would be interesting to know what is that tipping point. Well, thank you all for joining us today, discuss the results of this community based collection spec survey. We are out of time, unfortunately, but you will receive the slides and link to the recording in the next week, and do keep the conversation going with that hashtag ARLSpecKit347. Thank you.