Linking the Enslaved at Dogue Run Farm • Milli: Towards A Community of Archives
Channel: LD4
Date: 20/07/2021

Linking the Enslaved at Dogue Run Farm, Dina Herbert and Lesley Parilla
One of the most famous families in American History, George and Martha Washington, each enslaved peoples at their estates, including Dogue Run Farm, part of Washington's iconic Mount Vernon. Using SNAC we are linking the names and resources of these people together and creating family trees. Rather than seeing the leaves and branches, we are turning the trees over to look at the roots as we build out the lives of these people. We plan to work with the descendants of the enslaved to help add information into SNAC and also Wikidata as a way of bringing the life stories of the enslaved to more people.

Milli: toward a community of archives, T B Dinesh
We think of the archives as the in-between space between stories, objects and future stories. In the Milli (https://milli.link) way, we think about a thousand tiny (semantically expressive) connections. Beyond provisioning for reuse of known attempts of co-relating metadata schemas and classification standards, user annotations will lead the way to personalize storytelling of people’s history in the archives. Beyond the possibility of bringing diverse voices to institutional archives, diverse sets of metadata that manifest from community collections evolve to become community managed community archives.

Milli is also a small effort to connect W3C Web Annotations to archival descriptions. The target of annotations are segments of archival descriptions that define how to find them, ala URLs. Milli users get to overlay new connections to content and metadata segments and store them in decentralized repositories, share them and use them in their stories. Milli team is working on releasing a prototype in time for the LD4 conference and seeks to welcome representative beta testers by then. Over time, Milli collective would facilitate discussions among the community around issues of diversity, archival standards, conservation, physical and digital access, pedagogy, privacy and the development of inclusive description standards.