title: Grant project: Digitizing Hidden Collections
Creators: name: Robinson, Lenora
name: Stambach, Abby
name: Villa, Lisa
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Collections
subject: Deaf Catholic Archives
subject: CLIR
subject: Library and Information Science

description: The Archives and Distinctive Collections at the College of the Holy Cross is almost half-way through a two-year CLIR "Digitizing Hidden Collections" grant project to digitize key components of the Deaf Catholic Archives (DCA). This collection of newsletters, scrapbooks, periodicals, conference material, publications, photographs, ephemera, books, and audiovisual recordings was donated to the College of the Holy Cross in 1990. Many diocesan and religious order archives did not keep records pertaining to their work with Deaf people, and so this unique collection provides insight into Deaf culture, and demonstrates how a subgroup, unable to fully participate and therefore marginalized, was able to create a vibrant faith community within the greater Catholic Church that is both spiritually and socially fulfilling. It continues to grow and is curated by Rev. Joseph Bruce, SJ. We will discuss the initial steps of working with the materials in the DCA to prepare for digitization in order to make this unique information discoverable, accessible, and usable to the Deaf community as well as students, researchers and anyone interested in the material. This includes addressing initial decision-making and workflow issues, as well as finding solutions to various challenges we encountered. The newsletters are the largest series in the DCA collection, representing over 10 countries and hundreds of Catholic dioceses, and as such have provided a blueprint for the procedures for requesting copyright permissions, privacy considerations, and creating the workflows for digitally processing all materials in the collection.
description: The Archives and Distinctive Collections at the College of the Holy Cross is almost half-way through a two-year CLIR "Digitizing Hidden Collections" grant project to digitize key components of the Deaf Catholic Archives (DCA). This collection of newsletters, scrapbooks, periodicals, conference material, publications, photographs, ephemera, books, and audiovisual recordings was donated to the College of the Holy Cross in 1990. Many diocesan and religious order archives did not keep records pertaining to their work with Deaf people, and so this unique collection provides insight into Deaf culture, and demonstrates how a subgroup, unable to fully participate and therefore marginalized, was able to create a vibrant faith community within the greater Catholic Church that is both spiritually and socially fulfilling. It continues to grow and is curated by Rev. Joseph Bruce, SJ. We will discuss the initial steps of working with the materials in the DCA to prepare for digitization in order to make this unique information discoverable, accessible, and usable to the Deaf community as well as students, researchers and anyone interested in the material. This includes addressing initial decision-making and workflow issues, as well as finding solutions to various challenges we encountered. The newsletters are the largest series in the DCA collection, representing over 10 countries and hundreds of Catholic dioceses, and as such have provided a blueprint for the procedures for requesting copyright permissions, privacy considerations, and creating the workflows for digitally processing all materials in the collection.