 I think it started. Thank you for joining us for this last day of the first week of the CNI virtual fall 2020 member meeting. I'm the director of CNI Cliff Lynch. And I'll be introducing this rather briefly. I'm going to talk about a couple of logistical things. This is being recorded and we will be making this session publicly available later. There is closed captioning available if you like to turn it on. We do have a chat stream available and please feel free to use the chat stream for comments or to introduce yourself as the session goes on. We have a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen. We'll hold all the questions till the end at which point Diane Goldenberg Hart will materialize to moderate the question and answer session but please feel free to ask questions at any point as they occur to you. I think that's everything in terms of logistical stuff. This is the session we have with us Paul Brackie from Gonzaga and also Jean McManus from the University of Notre Dame. The presentation today I think is going to be quite interesting. It deals with the development of a Catholic news archive. There are a number of efforts that I am aware of to capture various collections of often smaller newspapers that were in distribution around America for many, many years. They tend to be really fascinating because they map into all kinds of immigrant communities and ethnic communities and things of that nature and really give us a wonderful set of insights into parts of the history of this country that aren't well known. So I think this will be a very interesting presentation and I'm very much looking forward to it. With that, let me just hand it off to Paul and say Jean and Paul, thank you so much for joining us. Over to you. Great, thanks Cliff. And thanks to all of you for joining us this afternoon. So I'm Paul Brackie, Dean of the Foley Library at Gonzaga University, and I'm also a member of the Board of the Catholic Research Resources Alliance, which is really the sponsoring organization of the Catholic news archive. My co-presenter is Jean McManus, a librarian for Catholic Studies and Archives Engagement at the University of Notre Dame, and we're really excited today to be able to share the work of the Catholic of the CRA, the Catholic Research Resources Alliance with you today on the Catholic news archive. And we'd also be remiss without acknowledging the contributions of Jennifer Younger, Executive Director of CRA for her contributions in developing the presentation. So we're just going to start by providing an overview of the initiative and the project, move into a discussion of the research value of the collections, and then move into a brief discussion of some of what we think are maybe the most pressing directions for future activities for the group. So, just start with a little bit of background. The Catholic news archive is a program of the Catholic Research Resources Alliance, CRA, as I mentioned. CRA is an independent membership organization that seeks to provide global access to Catholic research resources. And we have about 50 members and partners. Many of these are academic libraries like Notre Dame or Gonzaga, Marquette, University of San Diego, places like that. And it also includes other sorts of cultural heritage institutions that have other unique contributions to make to our work. So, for example, we have religious congregation and diocesan archives such as the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, the Catholic Historical Research Center of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the Daughters of Charity Provincial Archives, as some of our members. The CRA has done through a number of programs, including the Catholic portal, which provides discovery to rare and difficult to locate Catholic research resources from across the Alliance's memberships. But really, the one, the one major initiative that we're here to share today is the Catholic news archive. So just to give you some context for the archive itself, the Catholic news archive is a digital collection of North American Catholic newspapers that is freely available to users and currently consists of about 500,000 digitized pages from 17 newspapers. And these papers cover a range of dates, geography and communities. Gene's going to discuss the research value of the collections in a little bit, but just to give you a few examples of some of the interesting newspapers that we have in the collection. You know, as a native St. Louis and I had to pick out the Shepherd of the Valley, which is the first newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, which was published in their 1830s and was an English and French language newspaper. Another interesting one is the Catholic worker newspaper started by Dorothy Day. And one that I'm also drawn to is La Esperanza, which was a national Catholic Spanish language newspaper in Los Angeles, published from the 30 from the late 20s through the 50s. And it focused on Catholic topics related to the US Spanish speaking population with a particular focus on the Mexican American community and had a unique transnational perspective. So within the archive, you know, scanning and conversion meter exceed the standards of the national digital newspaper program with article and page level indexing done in with Metz Alto can widely used for newspaper digitization projects around the world. Our platform that we use is Viridian, a company based in New Zealand, provides a mobile mobile friendly platform, again used by many, many digital newspaper digitization projects, including the State Library and National Library even projects. So here's a screenshot so that you can just get a feel for what it looks like. So what I'd like to discuss now is really how we've gotten to really have the archive that we have. So the Catholic newspaper archive has been developed with a set of development and partnership strategies to guide the effort. I'll start with some of the developments. Prior to the sequencing number of these on the slide but they're just a couple that I'd like to particularly highlight. So really just a fundamental, fundamental principle for us is that we've really been wanting to design this design this archive with concern for functionality and access for researchers. We acknowledge that there is probably other uses, which we would encourage, but the use by researchers has really been primary in the development of the archive. The goal of the archive is to provide long term barrier free access to the collection. But, you know, in the interest of the newspaper publishers who are partners, it also reserves rights for commercial use to those to those newspaper publishers. And, you know, finally, I think, and this is something that I think is really incredibly important about Catholic news newspaper archive but also CRAs work in general, is that a goal of the project has been to allow the participation of a range of participants in the project in a variety of roles. And this includes participation from small academic libraries who might not otherwise have the resources or opportunity to participate in large scale digitization projects, but also as, as the our membership list may indicate, also other types of institutions that might not always be included as partners with academic libraries and these sorts of projects. In the news archive in particular some examples of these would be our many diocesan archives partner partners, the Catholic communication campaign of the US Conference of Catholic bishops, and also a community of women religious. So, you know, partnerships are really important are really incredibly important to us in our work. And we've get engaged in a, you know, in a number of activities to develop these partnerships on different levels. First, as I mentioned in the previous slide, a, you know, one of our goals is one of our key partners is our news or would be our newspaper newspaper publishers. You know, without permissions and their partnership. This, this, this archive couldn't exist. And, you know, one thing that we found interesting is that openness has really been a selling point to this partners for whom a primary concern is really expanding their communities of readers, as well as, you know, there's also an interest in contributing to scholarly communication, scholarly community, the scholarly community at large. And we're able to partner with them in a manner that allows for open distribution of their publications while also reserving the right rights for them to engage in some commercial reuse as they wish. So for this, so for example, there might be digitization of sacramental records that would be listed in newspapers through commercial sources. You know, so I think that, you know, key point that Jennifer younger always makes is that for our publishers it's, you know, participation, the decision to participate with the Catholic news archive versus commercial outfits is not necessarily an either or proposition for them. There's an extent to which they can do both and in fact some of our partners have been able to leverage their commercial digitization activities to be able to contribute scans of their work to the news archive. One of the things that we really need to do there is, we really needed to develop partnerships with a variety of libraries and archives to to secure access of copies for digitization. Now these are materials that where there are very few large collections of Catholic newspapers, where even libraries that can that collect them may have limited retention policies. They're really hidden not just hidden collections but they're really widely scattered collections as well and we've that's where it's really been particularly important for us to be able to work with with institutions like diocesan archives who hold so many of these scattered resources. And finally, the third thing is that we've really worked and develop great partnerships regarding governance. So, we've really been engaged not only within CRA but also engage in engaging scholars and our publishing partners in helping to make policy and strategic decisions strategic direction decisions for the archives. And these, these partnerships have also carried over into our funding. So, you know, we've done cooperative funding of pilot projects of contributing, we've done cooperative, cooperative funding through CRA for funding kind of ongoing some of the ongoing hosting costs, but also worked with our members and with other partners on securing grant funds to to launch to digitize additional content. So with that, I'll hand things over to Jean to discuss the research value of the collections within the archive. Thanks Paul. So we've listed on this slide some of the themes and more prominent names that that researchers have used the Catholic news archive to mine. And we even with our current corpus of 17 titles. We can really show change over time and Catholic reporting cap topics of interest to to Catholics nationwide, really from the 1830s, all the way into the 21st century. Although that's not any more additions that we can make that will add to the ability to turn up the Catholic perspective. So on this slide we've got, we've got images of Columbus monuments, European one and then on the right is Columbus behind a fence and it's actually a local statue that is under consideration for either contextualizing or possible removal or something like that. But Columbus is kind of a useful figure to highlight here because that's something that the Catholic news archive can do is give give access to thoughts on things like monuments and what themes were important. The archive turns up more than 2000 references to Christopher Columbus, and that shows the 19th century Catholic enthusiasm for the for Columbus as a Catholic hero. And, but there's also toward the later end of the whole archive, you see information about, you know, the controversies associated with Columbus. We've also got streams that document Indian schools, Native Americans, Catholicism among smaller groups, black Catholicism. So all of these things are things that we want to add to the collection in order to to get at some of these more perhaps niche communities. And with increased attention to diversity, equity, inclusion that will certainly shape the way that we, we seek titles to add to the collection going. But for now, we're, we're thinking about what, you know, from the national newspapers that are already included. And what kind of diversity can we present in terms of language like last. The early French language portions of some of the newspapers. And we're considering things like, can we highlight the one of the first black Catholic newspaper actually published in Detroit in the 1880s and 90s, the American Catholic Tribune, published by Daniel Rudd born a slave in Kentucky. And then we also have access to collections like the, the, the Catholic Sue Harold, which was also published in the 19th century by one of those. An Indian school and mission in South Dakota. So, these are the directions that will go in to increase the access to these, these kind of themes. We can go to the next slide, which is again a screenshot of the Catholic news archive showing our, our content for Columbus, Columbus on its own as a keyword pulls up everything from Ohio cities and other places and the Knights of Columbus, etc. But you'll note in the tiny text in the bottom corner we've got facets that show the, the coverage just in that portion of the screen 1839 we've got 63 references to Christopher Columbus so for certain topics this is going to be a really rich resource as we add to it, even more of a rich resource. You can go to the next slide, Paul, the Catholic news archive with all of the members and partners is proving already to be useful in managing our collections we do have a lot of access in and academic Catholic libraries included in our membership, and none, no one of us know, even coalition of us can digitize all of the relevant resources, but collectively, we're seeing that we can really leverage this for our own purposes and then for that greater good that Paul beginning, we are governed by members of the CRA and in consultation with scholars with all of the partners. Each institution is able to put forward for prioritization titles that they're interested in that titles that might be relevant to their local community. Scholars who we've convened from around the country, a lot of historians, unsurprisingly, have a great deal of interest in surfacing this kind of these kind of resources. And so there's a vibrant conversation about what things to include and how to go forward, and then libraries can rally around and archives as well to support the digitization of particular titles and to start with an eye toward digitizing the the quote unquote Vatican two years of particular newspapers because that is an area of great interest. It's true that these newspapers that we've selected are ones that are often not included in larger commercial collections, newspaper databases, or even in some of the efforts we've seen like chronically in America from Library of Congress. We're only a handful and only partial representation of Catholic newspapers. So we do feel like we're contributing to that larger open access material that's out there. We the digitization and digital preservation go hand in hand, as things are put forward for digitization and that's been by particular members seeking grants, but then orienting their their digitization efforts toward inclusion in the the Catholic News Archive. We've seen real success with that. And because the the standards for the platform are consistent, it gives everyone an ongoing access to to these resources. And we have been very happy to use this in a couple of instances where we, as a library we can provide financial support along with others to the digitization and the hosting example of that, where we have contributed potentially but the digitization, the quality control the hosting is done in a centralized way through the Catholic News Archive and that is a beautiful thing. We don't have to. In our, in our home institutions we don't have to be concerned about that we do it collectively. The image on this page is of the American newsstand. I don't have actual details about where this is but, and that's a bit of a gesture toward the kind of diversity we'd like to include in the future, where we would like to explore digitizing American Catholic newspapers, of which there were a robust number from the late 19th century into the early to mid 20th century. Pretty much an undiscovered or little use because it's larger film and also in German language, but a resource that could contribute to that larger greater good. Moving on to the next slide I believe Paul. All right, so I'm going to wrap up just very briefly with with with just some brief remarks about a couple of our future directions and then we should have a few minutes yet for questions. So, you know as much as far as we've come with the with the archive, you know there's of course there's always more to do. And, you know, the main thing I'd like to leave you with on this is that we're always trying to to make sure that we make this as useful to scholars as possible. And so there are a number of features that we're trying to do, you know, ranging from, you know, adding additional content to things like making it easier to do text mining or do both downloading of content from from the archive. One of the things that we'd really like to invite you both those of you who are in the audience today but also those of you who might be watching this after the fact to do is to give us some feedback on what might be particularly useful to you. I mean either in terms of content or in terms of functionality and so there's a survey link here that we'd we'd really appreciate it if you could give us some some input on. The other thing, and just to reiterate a point that Jean made in her in her remarks is that we are really very interested in expanding inclusion within the collection and making sure that the wide range of voices that are part of the Catholic community in North America are represented within the Catholic News Archives. So with that, our present that's our presentation and we'll open it for questions. Thank you Paul and Jean for that really interesting presentation on that wonderful resource. We appreciate you coming to see and I to talk to us about that. And thanks to our attendees for joining us here this afternoon if you're on the East Coast. We'll open up the floor now for questions or comments relating to this topic so please go ahead and type your questions now into the Q&A box and I'll be happy to share those with our presenters. And while we are waiting for folks to mull over what they've just heard. I'm just wondering I realized this resources, a North American resource. Are there any thoughts about going international with this. You know, I, I, there have not. I think that there's been some interest. So, you know, Jennifer younger, for example, as it has indicated there might be some interest in thinking about other, you know, really, we say North American but really what's in the archive is US And so I think that there's interest in looking at Canada and Mexico and the Caribbean for certainly beyond that. I'm not so sure. Okay, got it. And about how many newspapers are in it right now. Yeah, so right now it's 17 newspapers. And as I mentioned those are from, you know, those represents, you know, much of the geography of the US they rate they represent different time periods from, you know, the 19 early 19th century through the through the 20th century. These are national newspapers, the Catholic worker, for example, which are major socialist newspaper. And it looks like Jennifer has jumped in here too. Yes, I just turned on Jennifer's microphone. So, Jennifer I see you made a comment in the chat. But please feel free to share that comment with us if you'd like. I'll just read that aloud. And so Jennifer, if she wants to join in please do Jennifer writes. Yes, we know there's interest among French Chilean and other Latin American countries. Money is the only obstacle. Canada papers on the are on the agenda now. So, okay, so you were asking me to share that okay got it no problem. If you want to jump in please feel free to do so at any time. I do comment that the Catholic news service newsfeed, which is digitized and fully in the, in the Catholic news archive is interesting in that that includes, say, dispatches from Rome and, and the like so there's it did. It is a new service and so there's services in a way a bit of an index to national and also to a certain extent international Catholic news. So that's been a very interesting addition to the roster of newspapers. Also the Catholic news and pictures is is very popular and we've found uses for this with a number of different audiences of course researchers and college students are among the big users as far as I'm concerned and as far as I observe. But also with younger students we've had interest from high schools in the area around our institution and we've had some pretty good success with pushing it out to people, the more visual the better in some cases for for our younger researchers. Yeah, that's that's great, great to hear. We have a question coming in now from Nathan girth. Nathan asks, thirsty comments it's a great it's great to see these materials being captured with so many participating organizations can you talk about how you handle the challenges of governance. Sure. Yeah, so we have a number of several governance bodies within that work with the project. So overall, overall management of anything CRA happens at the board of that of that of the parent organization, but there's also a newspapers project committee that is part of of the specific the cna camera gene if you're on that. There's also a scholars committee that that work where we work with, you know, faculty and historians and such who might want to use that to get feedback from that perspective. And then there's also a group of the publishing partners that that we work with and really, when I say we, that's really the executive director doing a lot of that work. Thank you. And thanks Nathan for that question. We also have another comment from Jennifer relating back to the question from before. And she says 85% of use comes from the US. The remainder comes from the UK European countries African countries, Indonesia and the Philippines so that's, there's a significant amount of international interest in the tool. Really interesting. All right. Well I don't see any more questions coming in right now and we are actually at time so I'll go ahead and bring the public version, the public portion of this presentation to a close by stopping the recording but I'll invite our attendees who are still here. If you're interested in hanging around. We can unmute you. You can approach the podium and have a chat with our presenters, make comments, ask questions, as you like. So once again, thank you so much, Paul and Jean for coming to see and I and sharing your project with us. It was really a pleasure to hear about. And thank you to all of our attendees. Take care everyone. Thanks very much.