 Welcome to the project briefing of the American Congress Digital Archives Portal. My name is Danielle Emerling, and I'm the Associate Curator for Congressional and Political Archives at West Virginia University, and the Director of the American Congress Digital Archives Portal Project. This project seeks to digitize and aggregate the primary sources of the U.S. Congress to make them more discoverable and accessible. The project focuses specifically on the personal papers of members. Personal congressional collections are created in the offices of members of Congress, and the collections are usually named for a member. But the collection names often obscure their breadth of content. Members' personal papers are invaluable for understanding legislative decision-making, constituent voices and opinions on policy topics, political processes, and America's social and political development over time. Despite their value, congressional archives are underutilized resources. Scholarly interests and trends are partly to blame, but significant practical barriers exist. Unlike presidential papers, which are centralized in one location, members of Congress choose the repositories for their collections. This means congressional collections are geographically dispersed among institutions large and small, with varying degrees of resources for processing and providing access to collections. The collections themselves are extremely large and often contain multiple formats, demanding several years of archival processing. For scholars, collections may be difficult to use, both because of a lack of travel funding and the varying levels of description in congressional archives. Those of us working in archives and libraries know that the pandemic has only exacerbated these challenges for archival research because of travel restrictions, reading room closures, and shrinking travel budgets. So what do these barriers look like for a researcher using congressional archives? Imagine that you are researching a policy, let's say the Children's Health Insurance Program or CHIP, a measure passed by Congress in 1997. If you wanted to better understand things like lawmakers' decision making or their bipartisan coalition building, you would want to find primary sources in the archives of the lawmakers responsible for CHIP. You can see here that I've mapped out your research trip for you. Your research almost certainly would take you to my home institution to view the archives of former Senator Jay Rockefeller. You would also need to research in the archives of two of his closest collaborators, Senator John Chaffee and Congressman John Dingle, which would bring you to the University of Rhode Island and the University of Michigan. You might also be interested in the complimentary proposal put forward at the same time by Senators Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy, which would then take you to the University of Utah and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. With your research budget, this trip is completely unrealistic. You may decide to visit one archives or to forego congressional archives entirely and make a single trip to the Clinton Presidential Library to study CHIP from the president's perspective. The American Congress Digital Archives portal will significantly improve these challenges by aggregating the personal papers of members of Congress into a single online platform. Through this nonpartisan project, we are making research and congressional archives easier and more equitable and sharing the value of these collections with new audiences of researchers, educators and the public. We are completing a foundational phase of the project made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We have also received support from the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress. In this phase, West Virginia University Libraries has partnered with the Robert J. Dolt Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas, and the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education. We're also working with an advisory board composed of leading individuals in the areas of congressional archives, scholarship and digital archives. In this phase, we have documented metadata standards and policies, developed portal prototype, conducted usability testing and a research priority survey, and planned for future phases of the project. Our portal prototype currently hosts more than 500 archival objects from the three partner institutions. To guide this work, we've articulated digitization and metadata standards, as well as guidance around issues like privacy and intellectual property. The site is developed using Samvera and will provide open access to both the content and the metadata. You can see here an image of a document in the portal with its accompanying metadata. Users of the portal can open this PDF to view a larger version and use a find or search option to search the OCR text. In the metadata, anything highlighted blue is a link that will open other relevant materials. For example, if the user clicks the link in the coverage Congress field, they will be able to view all materials from the 89th Congress that are available in the portal. An exception to this is the link to the collection finding aid field, which will take the user to the institution's finding aid for the collection from which the material was digitized. In the last quarter of 2021, we conducted virtual user experience interviews to help us improve the site's usability. Interviewees were asked to complete three search tasks and rate their experience. Over 20 interviews with archivists, political scientists and historians, users gave the site an overall satisfaction score of 87%. Overall, users appreciated the ease of using search and search filters. Reactions to the site layout and navigability were also positive. Users also recommended some improvements, such as better aligning the search bar and search limiters, adding an advanced search option, decreasing the amount of metadata fields and search results for better scanability, improving the ability to sort by date, and adding the ability to sort by material type, creating a citation tool for individual items, allowing API integrations to better support quantitative research, and featuring more dynamic content on the homepage, as well as adding subject or research guides. Because of the size and number of congressional collections, we know we can't put everything online. So in this early phase, we gathered data from potential users that will help us prioritize our efforts. After gaining IRB acknowledgement, we conducted a survey in October and November of 2021. We asked demographic questions and questions about research topics and preferences, research methods with digital archives, and instruction with congressional archives. We received 126 responses. We found that most respondents identified in the disciplines of history and political science, and most identified as faculty. The vast majority, 97% of respondents identified as archives users, and a significant number 85% said they have used congressional archives. We also asked respondents to tell us about their past research projects, as well as aspirational projects using congressional archives. We did this in two ways. We asked them to rank their research topic priorities related to Congress, and we supplied the topics for ranking. Second, we provided a short answer question. And the results from the ranking question, you can see there's not a vast difference between each of the topics, but it gives us some ideas about where to start our efforts. For example, the number one rated topic leaders and parties could include materials about elective elected leaders, leadership activities, party organizations and party continuity and change. Number three rules and procedures includes things like lawmaking processes, congressional reform, and how a bill becomes law. Some of these topic areas are illuminated further in the short answer question, in which we asked respondents what topics, issues or people they have studied, or would like to study in congressional archives. Here's a snapshot of those responses. The top ranked topic areas, such as leaders and parties decision making rules and procedures and elections were also frequently mentioned and are reflected in the categories Congress and government operations and politics. One ranked topic that is perhaps more important than respondents it indicated is Congress as policymaker. Many of these open ended responses deal with the creation and history of specific public policy. The most prevalent of the policy areas mentioned by respondents include civil rights and liberties, agriculture and food, armed forces and national security and international affairs. As we make plans to add more content to the portal, we will ask partners to correlate their collection materials to priority areas. We also asked respondents to indicate the importance of different document types out of a list of 24. You can see the top 10 list here. Many of these document types correlate to the topic areas ranked highly by respondents, such as leaders and parties, but also to Congress as policymaker and Congress as a representative institution. Finally, we asked respondents about their experiences with digital archives and instruction. Most participants who responded indicated they have used digital archives, but the majority have only engaged with basic search, rather than advanced methods such as text mining. When searching and browsing digital archives respondents identified the most helpful categories as topic person name and date. The participants who responded have not used congressional or digital archives for instruction, but indicated that somatic document sets are or would be the most helpful instructional tool. Respondents who have used archives for instruction identified learning outcomes that relate to primary source literacy core ideas, or to subject knowledge acquisition. So we conclude this foundation phase of the project. We are planning for the future. Our immediate goals are focused on developing the portal. We will continue to develop with open source applications, namely Sam Vera, and contribute new findings back to the community. We plan to contract with the web and application development company to help us scale the project. We have the application from internal hosting to the cloud, and we will transition from hosting content to harvesting content will also be updating standards policies and procedures to reflect this new model. In phase three, we plan to expand partnerships and portal content to complete development for the nation's 250th anniversary in 2026. We will expand the number of partner institutions with a goal of including at least one institution from each state. With more partners will also be adding more content to do so we will use the data from our survey to guide content selection. Additionally, we want to focus on the contributions underrepresented people and communities have made to Congress by including the archives of women, Hispanic, black, Asian and Pacific Islander and indigenous Americans, as well as Americans with disabilities, who have served in Congress. Right now, the formats represented in the portal are primarily texts and photographs, but we will expand to include audio visual materials. Development of the portal will also continue as we improve search and fascinating features and add advanced search, as well as the ability to bulk export metadata from search results. During this phase, another goal is to support public facing scholarship and civics and history education programs that use materials from the portal. Additionally, with the ability to bulk export metadata, we will have the opportunity to support more computational data driven approaches to studying the materials in the portal. With our partners, we will also create a governance plan to ensure the project is sustained and staffed beyond soft funding and beyond 2026 phase four will be about continuing to add partners and content and supporting scholarship and educational initiatives. Development of the portal application will transition toward maintenance. The most important part of this phase will be implementing our governance plan to sustain the portal into the future. Earlier, you imagined you were a researcher, potentially traveling to many different archives to investigate a single policy. But now imagine that you are able to do that work from your home. Imagine if congressional archives from all 50 states were represented online, and a broader audience of researchers, educators, and the public could better understand what Congress does, how it does it, and why it's important. The time in which America is experiencing deep political division challenges to democratic norms and values, and when many, many Americans believe democracy is in crisis. This project takes on new urgency. It has perhaps never been more important for scholars educators and the public to have access to the historical records of the legislative branch. One of our grant proposal reviewers put it well. In part they wrote, researching presidents or courts is vastly easier than researching Congress, a fact that has led to a fairly lopsided historical literature. This project's goals would help remedy this imbalance. We believe this project will do exactly that, and make the first branch of government, the people's branch more discoverable and accessible to everyone. You can explore the portal and access project documentation at congressarchives.lib.wvu.edu, or contact me at Danielle.Emerling at mail.wvu.edu. Thank you for watching.