C2C Care Preserving the Now: Archiving in Times of Crisis

Perfect. Well, hello. Hi everyone and welcome to today's connecting to collections care webinar. My name is Samantha Hunt Duran and I'm the new COC care coordinator joining you from Denver, Colorado. This is my first rodeo moderating CDC care webinar. I am delighted to be here. Joining me today is Kate Lee, um, outreach manager at the Foundation for Advancement and Conservation, FIC, which runs COC Care. And our programming is made possible through support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Let me get my presentation up. There you go. And we're also supported through generous individual contributions. As a reminder, we offer free monthly programs on collections care and you can always find us at connectingtocolctions.org. On our site, you'll find an archive of past webinars and learn about upcoming programming. We also host a fantastic community forum where you can connect with colleagues and post your collections care questions to get answers from our volunteer experts. During our programs, we use the Wordley app for captioning and translation services. You can use the QR code on your screen right now or the link that I am sharing in the chat at this very moment uh to join that service. If you decide to use Wordley in the Zoom app, you'll want to pop out the Wordly app first. Then open the Zoom chat box to make sure you don't lose anything on your screen. And if you're viewing the program in a browser window instead of the Zoom app, you'll need to access the transcription via that QR code or via the link. and the wordly live stream link that appears in the upper right hand corner of your screen is also a way to join that feed. I encourage you to connect with us on social media. We're on Facebook and LinkedIn. And our next webinar is taking place in September on preserving born digital media and digital collections. And stay tuned for updates on another upcoming program which will focus on collection moves. Lots of good stuff coming up. So keep an eye on our website to register for those. As a reminder, this webinar has both a chat function which you all are you using very well. Thank you so much. Um and we have a Q&A function. So if you have any questions specifically for our presenters, please use that Q&A button. And as you all are doing right now, use the chat to say hi and tell us where you're joining from. As I mentioned earlier, we'd like to acknowledge the support of IMLS and recognize all of the community support we've received from COC Care users like you. If you've benefited from COC Care, we hope you'll consider making a gift to support us. And now to welcome today's speakers, we'll hear from Josh Berford and Megan Sullivan, co-executive directors of Invisible Histories, which is a community-based archive that preserves research and creates educational community centered content about the rich and diverse history of LGBTQ people, places, and events in the US South. You can read their full bios on this program's web page using the link I am posting right now. And with that, I'd like to hand things off to our presenters, Josh and Megan. Welcome. >> Hi, good morning everybody. Let me get my screen up here for y'all. Okay. Can I get a thumbs up if y'all can see that? All right. >> Looks great, Josh. >> Great. Thank you. So, my name is Josh Berford. My pronouns are he, him. I am one of the co-founders and co-executive directors of Invisible Histories. Megan, do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, I'm Megan Sullivan. My pronouns are she, her, and I am the other co-founder and co-executive director of Invisible Histories. >> We're really excited to be here to talk to y'all about uh the preservation work that we're doing and hopefully some helpful hints and tips for y'all to take back. Again, please feel free to ask questions at any time and we'll get to those when we get to the end. So, um, Invisible Histories is a community- based archive. Um, we're a nonprofit project. We started working in 2018 um which is when we picked up our very first boxes, three boxes from our donor, Glenda Elliot, um which helped seed the collection. Um and then as of this year um in 2026, we are opening an LGBT Southern Research Center which will include our archives, community programming, and research. [clears throat] We'll be open to the public officially on November 14th this year. So, if y'all like to come down for the opening, we're going to do a big Saturday day and have vendors and tours of the space and looks at the collection. And we're open right now uh primarily by appointment and we actually have already had a ton of researchers that have come by and used the collections. So, we focus on some primary elements to the work. Community engagement is number one, archiving, preservation, research and scholarship, education and professional development and best practices. For us, preservation is really important. But more important than preservation is accessibility. We want to make certain that people are in the collections using them, reading them, using them for projects, anything we can do to get their hands on. While we're actively collecting in six southern states, uh, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas, actively for us means staff time. Um, our geographic area actually consists of 13 states in the south. I've put the list here because this is a point of contention. What counts as the south? Um, and if you don't believe that people feel strongly about not being included, please go to our Instagram and you can see folks from Oklahoma who feel very strongly that they're not on this list. Don't take my word for it. Go to our Instagram and you will see them there. Um, one of the things that we have been doing the last couple of years is making certain that as a community based archive who has a lot more freedom, um, Megan and I like to joke that we're just kind of making stuff up as we go along and it's just the two of us doing the work, that we are trying are desperately to make certain that material that is being restricted in other places is not being restricted within community based archives and that we're reaching out to our partner archists and librarians to see if we can support them to make certain that they have the things that they need in a time of heightened fascism with their own collections across the DEI spectrum, not just LGBT, um to make certain that those collections were not being de accessioned uh forcibly removed or hopefully reconsidered for acceptance in places. And so when we started, we had this idea and we still believe this that queer and trans people deserve to be in state archives, public libraries in the states and communities that they're from. um because queer people in the south are everywhere and we think that you should be able to walk into one of these places and see your own history. And so when we started we were in an intermediary. We worked with existing resource institutions like public libraries, university archives, state archives to put these collections in these spaces so people could see them. So we did the leg work. We worked with the donors and then we had um memorandums of understanding with our partner repositories that laid out how the material should be used. One of the things we wanted to avoid is the fact that although we have great and amazing relationships with individual archavists, individual archavists don't run institutions. And so we wanted to make certain that we could protect things from being de accessioned from being having their metadata changed which has happened so often in the last 40 years. And so what happened was in 2023 uh we had an incident and we realized at that point that we needed to stop and reassess what we were doing to make certain that we were not putting collections at risk when they got out of our control even though we hadus with people. And so Megan uh gave a talk at the state archives in Montgomery. It was a talk I had actually given the year before on a different subject with no fanfare whatsoever. It was just a talk. Um just to give you a sense of the talk Megan was doing, it was just a talk about queer people from Alabama. It was like all factual stuff. It wasn't in any way controversial. and a local uh alt-right newspaper um I won't say their name because let's not give any traction picked the story up and then pretty much immediately two very conservative members of the Alabama government took it upon themselves to try to defund her partner and so to the tune of around $5 million and so Megan being Megan um in her interview said that it exactly right she's been proved right a million times that this is textbook fascism when you try to come in and censor people who are actually giving you the street. This is what fascists do. And so we got a ton of push back from this. We got doxed. We had to deal with law enforcement. And it really showed us that in this moment, like we were more exposed than we thought. The response from our repository partner was silence. And so we realized pretty quickly that we were going to have to shift. Like we couldn't protect things and make them accessible in ways that we wanted. And so 2023 was the year we stopped at that particular moment and we started thinking about building our own archive. The only way we could keep these things safe and accessible was if we did the work ourselves, which we didn't want to do, by the way. I don't know about you, but opening up an LGBT archive in the South at a time of heightened fascism is not the best business decision one has ever made. Um, especially when funding for the humanities was already pretty thin in the first place. What we realized right away was that in the position that we were in as a CBA who was doing this work, we needed to stop and take a look at what was going on in other places and with our partners. And so we want to talk to you guys today about what is actually happening on the ground. And so we've put a few things together um that some of you probably know and maybe some that you don't, but like the increased threat for nonprofits comes from the fact that so many of our partners that we worked with were being controlled funding by the state and federal government. I'm almost right away with the elimination of the NE. We were seeing federal funding for all sorts of DEI work happening very quickly with almost no warning. Um, and then as those things have progressed, what we're seeing is the systematic underfunding of education isn't just aimed at the humanities. It's aimed at eliminating anything they think is DEI across the spectrum. Likewise, within the last year or two, the FBI has been weaponized against organizations, as is law enforcement. Um, now officially as invisible histories because we support trans identity, we have we're technically on the list of terror organizations in the US, which is not a position we thought we would be in pres preserving queer history and doing archiving. Um, the earliest part of this work that we're going to talk about a little more later, was the removal of websites and exhibits. This was being done at the federal level, but also across the spectrum in conservative parts of the country. And when I say conservative, I don't just mean the American South. I mean places that are have conservative little C aversions to anything being said negatively about them which is a lot of higher ed honestly like there is an aversion to being told they can't do something or that they got bad press and then audits are being happening studies of our paddle collections museums academic courses this started happening in Texas and Florida but it is now happening all over the US and now that we've this we're this far into 2026 we are actually hearing from a lot of archavist as historians, faculty, even our own donors about how scared they are about the future of the collections about their work, about their lives, the things that are now being xed out because they are considered too controversial. We've put together this bit.ly link for you, which your organizers will share with you to give you a little more background information about what's been happening. um offices that are being closed, places that are just literally people coming to work on a Monday, the locks have been changed from their office or they're getting threatening emails from their deans to de accession collections to or to hide collections. And so we're going to send this out to y'all so that you in your own time can look at this, but I will say this list is probably triple from when we started of places that have been closed. And so in a in a minute we're going to talk a little bit more in depth about direct threats to archives and collections and the plan that is in place um as those things evolve. But right now we're going to talk a little bit about the community and how maybe you could be rethinking your role as a state controlled or state funded institution or someone who is you know at more risk for state censorship. uh and but you still want to contribute to the community. You still want to stay there even as like your status as a repository is potentially threatened. So, next slide, please. The one thing that Josh, can you use the next slide? There you go. Thank you. Um uh so the one thing I do want to remind us all is that when we're talking about this, you know, Josh and I are from the south. A lot of what has happened has happened in, you know, Alabama, Texas, Florida, places like that. And a we have we do a lot of talks about this lately because we're heavily involved in this kind of planning and response work. Uh and a lot of times people want to kind of brush this off as a specifically southern or red state issue. And while we have been doing it for a really really long time, it doesn't mean that it's just about us. And it's really important that people outside of the South and in blue states recognize that you're just as much at risk. This is a national issue. It's a global issue. This far-right push, this anti-intellectualism, anti-history push is global. And so, just because you're in California or New York does not make you safe. Um, and so we all need to be thinking about that. And we also need to be reminded that the South is not a scapegoat uh for other people to be like, well, it doesn't matter because these people deserve it. They voted for it. Right? The South is one of the most diverse regions uh in the entire country. the largest percentage of black folks, LGBTQ folks, disabled folks, poor and rural live in the south. So, it's an incredibly marginalized community. Uh, and we need to remember that when we forsake the south, we forsake the most marginalized. Uh, just my little soap box that I have to do probably once or twice a week now. Uh, but rethinking your community role. So, if you're concerned about what's happening at your institution and we're at the very end, I'm going to give you kind of like a rubric to kind of gauge where you are uh with concern for your collections. But if you are already having, you know, seeing things happening in the academic side, if you're seeing things happening in your student affairs side or in your administration, whatever that may be. Um, if the library, if your libraries are being questioned or audited, then you should probably be thinking about how your role might change. If you are no longer the place where marginalized collections can be safe and not by any fault of your own, but because of actions from the state or administration, then how can you continue to connect with the community? because I actually think it's a really great opportunity to kind of shift the way that we think about community connections for institutions. So your whole role doesn't need to go away. So instead of maybe thinking about yourself as you know the repository, the holder of the knowledge, instead think of yourself as a wealth of resources and experience that can be shared with communities. And the good news is a lot of y'all are probably already doing that. We have seen a huge push in the last probably 10ish years for people to start becoming more community- based. Institutional archavists are working very very heavily in the communities oftentimes with a specific community group. Um and so a lot of this foundation is already here. So what can you do? Share professional knowledge. That is something that is really important. You know, most people can't afford or have the time to go to archiving school. And a lot of that practical knowledge can be shared with community folks fairly easy. It may take a little while, but train people how to save their histories in very very practical and approachable ways. They don't have to do it perfectly as long as they're doing it. Um, and we can be a huge role in that. And then providing resources. And I I think this has been a really cool thing. I know this is becoming harder as anti-DI rules are rolling out like you can't host certain things but whatever you can get away with event spaces supplies doing educational talks like at you know local events like a Junth or a a pride month something like that uh and then getting people in your collections get people in you know now that we've got our space it is just so and I I know a lot of y'all know this but it's just magical to have people come in and see the space like we had someone crying yes or yesterday or the day before literally crying in the space because she was like I never thought I'd be in a space like this and it just it's very meaningful. We have young people just, you know, freaking out, just being super uncool about how cool, you know, obviously telling me something from 1998 is the oldest thing they've ever seen, which is insulting, but getting people in your archives is incredibly important. And I don't think that we can oversell that. And then obviously partnering with local community based archives and projects. And now we're going to talk a little bit, next slide, please, about uh some things that we've done that we think that you could do with the community. So, our memory keepers program is a program that is actually a lot of work. Uh, and it's kind of expensive. So, I don't know why we started with the hardest one, but what Memory Keepers is is it's a year-long cohort. We people apply for this. Uh, and they get a series of trainings on how to do oral histories and physical collection preservation. Just the very minimum, like getting things, what makes sense, what kind of collections are we looking for? And they develop a project with us. And this is about 10 10 or 11 hours of training uh that they go through over several weekends. Um and they get this this kit that you can see right there that has all sorts of supplies. Some of these supplies they don't actually need. We just know that people really like to get like white gloves and stuff like that. So you just throw it in there cuz it makes them feel fancy. But they get, you know, resources, they get trainings, and then they develop a local project where they do three oral histories in one physical collection. And that might be as small as just a couple of pictures and some letters or it might be more significant around a particular topic in their community. That's what's really, really important. We insist that they be a part of this community so that they can be telling their own community stories instead of going into other communities and trying to like learn things that they're not familiar with. And so they spend a year on this. We do um regular meetings with them. We help them formulate their questions. We help them describe their project. And then at the end we get I think there was around 10 that we did. It's on pause right now while we're building um while we're opening our new space, but I think there was around 10 people that would do it. So, we'd end up with or nearly not everyone would finish it, but 20 to 30 oral histories that were ready to be transcribed and usually five to 10 collections out of that, maybe like a picture or something um that we we had gotten from everyone. So, it was incredibly efficient for getting folks. It also helped us because now that we are regional, we can't be everywhere. Um, and we had not just people doing this work and telling their own stories, but they were cheerleaders for the project in their communities. They were there to vet us and be like, "This is cool. You should participate in this. This is what they're doing." So, I really um I love this. And if you would like to, you will put my email in the chat um and you can email us and I'm happy to send you this list of supplies that we have in it. It is pretty expensive now though. It didn't used to be, but um it's really great. Next slide, please. hackathon. So, uh, when the election happened, uh, we were all texting, actually. So, Josh and I had a paid gig. We had a consulting and speaking gig at the College of Charleston the night before, uh, on election night, and we had to go do a talk that very morning with a bunch of young people who were literally weeping in their classroom. So, second moral is don't do that. any election day. Don't have anything planned for the next day. But uh we were all just talking and texting about, you know, what we might do. And because, you know, as goes the South, as goes the nation, we knew that a lot of what had been happening down here was a blueprint for project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation and what they had planned to roll out. And that did prove to be true. So, we decided that we needed to start uh preserving what we knew was going to be at risk really quickly. Josh and I had both worked in diversity offices. So, we developed a hackathon series that we did and we had around 200ish 300 people per session. Uh we did one Oh, I think my internet's messing up, but uh we did one in 2024 and 2025. Uh and basically what happened was people came in and they were assigned. We had forms. Again, I'm happy to make copies of these and give them to people where they were going and searching in our 13 states uh for diversity related offices. So, anything that was state controlled, anything that was at high high risk. They also found some nonprofits particularly like trans nonprofits that we thought might be attacked. uh and they made a list of that for the first hour and then in the second hour everyone was assigned a Facebook of an organi or a list of organizations and they spent the second hour pulling photos and describing them in a form and so they would upload them into the form. They would describe them. Uh and the reason why we did that is because Facebook Meta hates preservation and it is impossible to get the data off of there. Um, and some of these sites had already started being closed. Their websites were being shut down, but they would have a Facebook left. That was really the only trace of uh the office or the organization. And so we um focus we saved around 934 links uh that are mostly don't exist anymore. And that we did that through our partnership with the internet archive. Not the internet. We do partner with the internet, but it was the internet archive. In fact, it's in the wayback machine now. Um, and we saved way over 2,000 files. And for many of these organizations, it was the it's the actual only thing that exists of them because the universities caught on to the Facebooks existing and they they have wiped them now too. So most of these links, most of these organizations no longer exist and they're already described. They're just really messy, but it is a lot of data. Next slide, please. The other thing that we did to go along with this is, you know, we're we're an LGBT archive, but we, you know, recognize that you can't kind of divide identities up like that, particularly at this like acute risk time. >> I think Megan's internet is glitch. >> Any level. Oh, did I cut out? >> You you froze, but you're good. Go ahead. >> I'm sorry. the NDEI uh office. I have Spectrum Internet and I just want to complain about them really quickly and then move on. Uh so that that we would be preserving their materials uh because we were hearing so many stories about people coming to work and their key card not working, not being able to log in their entire office. I actually went and tried to dumpster dive for my old office um and everything was gone. The dumpster was gone. The entire office was cleared. And so we worked with several different um people one-on-one to do some collecting, you know, people who were coordinators or directors of those centers, but we also got around 175 volunteers. And this is kind of like a followup to the hackathon. We took that hackathon list of at risk um universities and institutions and we assigned them and then they had three months to download things from their social media. if there was still their website running, they would make a note of that. Um, and we got, this is also still incredibly messy, but a lot of data. And again, out of all the ones that we saved. Um, there were 60 that we we went to, and I don't know that any of them exist anymore. There might be one or two that still exist. Um, and so that's really the only materials that were saved from them because we talked to some institutional archavists and a lot of them, again, they threw everything away. So even the institution didn't get to preserve its own history. It's it's literally gone. Uh next slide, please. >> It's annoying the crap out of Megan that she's freezing here. >> Am I freezing? >> Yes, you're freezing. Do you want me to do this while you figure that out? >> I I don't I can't tell I'm freezing. I apologize. >> You're good. You're back. Do you want to keep going? >> Yeah. Yeah. Next slide. >> Go ahead. >> Oh, this is the next one. Yeah. >> Oh, this is the next one. Okay. So, so sorry. Uh, yes. And so, we have also been, like I said, doing physical relocations of of materials. This got really hard to do because it happened so quickly. Most people were like out on vacation um and came back or a long, you know, weekend or something like that. So these are some things if you are particularly at a university or an institution that has multiple offices I would go ahead and start reaching out to your DEI related even your academic people your people who are doing classes the researchers your people who do exhibiting anything like that that is DEI related uh again even if you're in a blue state or a non- southern state and go ahead and start talking about what that preservation model might look like now if you haven't already I think it is time because Again, most of this is wouldn't have anything at all had we not had volunteers help us grab a few pictures here and there. Next slide, please. >> So, from a practical standpoint, the question is like what can what can we be doing as archavists to keep this going and to make sure that we're not losing things because it is it is a pretty scary time. The reality right now is that any collection in any university or state or federal institution is up for censorship. Um, we are getting reports pretty regularly of things all the way from maybe you should just reclassify those collections or take that off the website so they're harder to find, which again is still censorship even if the collections are still there. And so the reality is there's just an opportunity for the federal government and the state governments where you live to come down on you. Um I want to say this again and we said this earlier collections are curated by individuals but not but they are under the opice of administrations and so you can see your work undone. I've seen this in a previous institution that I worked at. I built two LGBT collections before I left. Another two were donated in the sort of wake of those. And then we had a great group of archavists who were couldn't have been happier to have exhibits and have them up. And then one very conserved I think of them as like an old school homophobe comes in as a dean of a library and suddenly none of the collections are accessible to anybody, the public, students, faculty. Um and so it's important for us to know that this is never about us. It's always about the longevity of these collections and what does it mean for us to do the work to keep them safe. And so right now, I mean, it's it's a hard pill to swallow, but right now the only organizations that are really and truly independent are community- based archives. Um, we are the ones in and again in some very rare instances, there are some public libraries in particular cities and municipalities that are totally independent, too. But when this censorship is happening, the response for us as archavists is going to have to be very nuanced. And we've seen the big reports, we've seen the how the this administration is taking the word slavery off of exhibits because it's it's considered too controversial. Um that they are removing LGBT from websites. Um groups are closing down. And so this it's just if you don't feel like at this point your collections are at risk, then you're not paying attention. Like the time is passed. We have a particular partner who we both love and adore and they are great people and they're doing the Lord's work, but their institution couldn't be more at risk. Every single day there's something that comes out about what's happening where they work. And it's so frustrating to see them say, "No, we'll be fine." The days of us flying under the radar are over. They just are. Because even though I wouldn't credit fascism with an overabundance of education, they at least have people that are willing to volunteer their time to look for things that can upset them. And so the idea that our archives are just they're not there. People don't see them. It's just not true anymore. And in the 1990s, many of you remember this. I remember this as a student, but many of you might remember this as an archavist. In the mid1 1990s at the height of the AIDS epidemic and don't ask don't tell and all of these things that were happening there was a push to try to protect DEI collections specifically LGBT collections by taking lesbian gay by and trans out of off of finding aids and off of descriptions and changing them into things like women's studies or things like diversity studies. basically leaving these collections 100% inaccessible to anyone who is looking for anything queer or trans. And so while the impulse might be good to not draw attention to materials, we are self censoring and never to protect them. And that's just not the point. You know, the I like to joke to my colleagues that the difference between archiving and hoarding is who sees your materials. And so if we're building collections, we should be building with an eye towards sharing, not to accumulating. Megan and I are very, oh, we made some archavists so green in the face one time in a talk we gave. I think it's probably with SAA where Megan said, I would rather someone take out a t-shirt and touch it a billion times until it turns into dust than leave it in a box for 100 years completely safe. And I feel exactly the same way. Like we need people to experience and learn, especially now from what's happening. And so we have got to get these collections back out into the hands of people who can use them and in places where they're not under so much threat. And so what you can do to help yourselves and to help the collections that are already with them is the first and the most important is a comprehensive search and calculations of your existing collections. What do you have that could fall under this anti-Dei censorship? Some people just don't know. And depending on when a collection was processed and by whom and by what year they went to library school, like there's a lot of metadata floating around there that maybe would fly under the radar. I like to joke right now that you can't send a Gen Z person into an archive to look for LGBT stuff if the metadata says homosexual on it because they don't use that word. They don't think of that word. And so we need as archavists to go in and look and see what do you have that could be at risk and to really give yourself a place to start from in case you do start to see that active meddling from administration either at your immediate [clears throat] level or up above you. Um and you know and in some ways the the people that want to censor our collections have done some of the leg work for us. So, you can actually go and look at what these hot button issues are and use those to search your own collections and just see what might pop up. It's a good it's a good practice anyway to look at your collections, but right now especially, you don't want to be caught in the dark about a collection that you've overlooked. That could then just be the landslide to getting rid of things that you couldn't imagine. Um, we actually do a physical marking of collections. Now, all of our stuff is LGBT, so all of our stuff is at risk. But we actually went through our collection. I have these little red dots that I put on certain collections that are ones that if something catastrophic were to happen, if we were to be raided by the FBI, if our servers were taken, like what collections would we need to be putting our hands on to save because they are the the most precious? And this is something you can do for censorship as well. going through and putting a little mark on something so you can quickly see it um will be really good for you in case you are asked to do something that professionally you would not normally want to do. Something that we've been discussing a lot lately is do you know what your deexception policy looks like? And so talk to the legal department, talk to your proono legal team, whomever that you have that does this and look at what your deexession policy looks like. That way you can know exactly what the time frame is. If you get told that these collections have to be removed, then what can you do to slow down the process by adhering to the letter of your deceptioning policy? Not just putting stuff away simply because, but knowing the letter of what it means to actually remove something from a collection. This will give you the opportunity to do the things that you need to do to shuffle these collections around and to make certain that they are as protected as one can make something at a time like this. I would say also that you really want to start while things are calm. Like if you're not under if you if you don't personally feel that you're under direct threat, that's an amazing feeling. I don't know that feeling currently, but if you feel that way, then that's great. you should start now because I'm guaranteeing you that no one is exempt from this. Um, and so you don't want to always having to wait until the house is on fire before you start putting stuff outside. And I know that myself, you know, I went to a library program that was very community centered. We talked a lot about our work and what our roles were and what we could actually be doing to support the community. And so I know for a fact that my education allows me the understanding that I am responsible for the community that I'm working within and their collections they've trusted me with. And the answer to the question of should you be worried is yes. I mean this is we're not here to like freak you out, but I'm here to freak you out a little bit. Like you need to be worried because all of us are under threat. Megan, >> so the one thing I want to do is just like affirm that this is a lot and it's overwhelming and I know that one of the things we're hearing from people is, you know, just a general worry and concern. Um, and so hopefully we can give you uh some action plans that are happening. Um maybe some of you here have come to one of these. uh but there is a emergency relocation network of uh many many community- based archives and uh both in the US and outside of the US we are working on an action plan. We actually have a plan currently for if and [clears throat] when the worst happens. Um and so there are three well there's actually four ways that we are uh planning to preserve marginalized history. The first is digital backups. Uh we have created a separate 200 terabyte server from our own 63 terabyte server. Um where we are offering 1 to two terabytes to institutions to take your most at risk materials. And this could even just be your websites that maybe are hosting an exhibit that has already been taken down or you think is about to taken down. We've gotten those sent to us. Um, if this is something you would like us to do now, and I'll give you some guidelines for when you should be thinking about this in a minute, uh, then you can email us and we will give you our mailing address and then we will, um, you can ship us an external hard drive. We're trying to not do this digitally. And then we will put it on our server so that it will be safe. Our server is only accessible to three people, uh, us and our web person. And so it is it's pretty safe and it is separate from our collections. So should our collections have an issue, this would be a separate in uh entity and also the server is portable. It is easily carryable should it need to be. Uh we are working on a long-term loan project. We actually have this already. It's been vetted by a couple of I think it's all been universities so far. Um but they do have the most difficult legal departments of anybody ever. Uh so it should work for other institutions as well. And what this is is let's you know say that there is an audit or I don't know like your horrible alt-right representative is coming to visit your archive for some reason and you need to get a collection out for a while. Um maybe a you know a specific amount of time or a longer amount of time. We have community based archives across the country that will take those loans. There'll be paperwork and you can use that if you don't have it already or they can use it if they don't have a long-term loan process already so that they can take it for whatever research, digitization, exhibiting, whatever thing you want to say so that they can hold it um as long as it needs to be held. I do want to say cuz I think I forgot this is not just LGBTQ collections. This is all marginalized collections. So, immigrant records, activism, um labor, disability, like anything that is heavily marginalized right now, we are working with multiple types of community based archives. Um and then the the one that is, you know, kind of the emergency nuclear option is the emergency relocation. Uh the good news is we're a queer archive, so we have a lot of lesbians that know a U-Haul like the back of their hand. So, we got them ready to go. And should things get to the worst uh then you can reach out to us and we will be there. We have a network of people who have already volunteered. We actually have you know how they transport them rescue puppies across the state across the countries. We got that. We got that. It's very it's very gay. It's very gay thing to do. Um, and so if this comes up, if this is something that you're concerned about now or in the future, all you would do is email us at that contact at invisibil invisiblehistory.org. The word the letters ae or emergency relocation. Uh, and I would reach out to you and I would we would shift over to an encrypted service like signal or proton uh, proton email and we would continue that. The only restriction on this is you we will not accept this from aedu and a.gov. The reason for that is we have gotten um multiple uh information that uh people are IT departments are scanning their emails that they're running AI scanning in certain states. Uh and we also had a board member who got a foyer attempt from the Heritage [clears throat] Foundation to try to find out things about us and one of our funders. um and the they were targeting theedu email specifically. So, we know this is happening. We want make people to make sure that they're safe. Anything that you're doing on your um on your work computer can be monitored and probably is at least being captured. If not, if it's not being actively looked at and if you're doing work stuff on your personal phone, then your personal phone becomes easier for to be monitored. So, you're going to really need to make sure you're splitting that work life balance right now. Don't put work stuff on your personal devices. It will be subpoenaable. They can get it. Um, so please keep that in mind when you're reaching out. And then next slide, please, Josh. The the one thing we really wanted to talk to y'all about is repatriation. And this is something that we've been pushing for a really long time, but I think this has given us a great framework to kind of rethink how important this is. We know that a lot of collections, particularly marginalized collections, came to institutions, oftentimes through sketchiness, maybe without the appropriate paperwork, maybe because somebody died and they just that people didn't know. Uh we we have a lot of stories of like predatory collecting um from out of state and then taking it away, like you know, state like somebody from California coming to Mississippi and taking a collection and it's never been used before. Um, and so what we would really like to encourage y'all to do now is think about your collections, like Josh said, what's in there? Who's at risk? Who's, you know, what communities are still active and don't necessarily have access to their own materials that are local to you? And think, am I the best repository for this? Should I be the bearer of this knowledge or should this go back to the community? Because while communities may not be able to keep these collections up to professional standards, I think it's really important for us as lovers of history and archive and preservation that we remind ourselves that no one is entitled to anyone else's history. Communities are entitled to do with their own histories what they will and that is up for them to decide. Um, and did I freeze? No. Okay. And so, so just keep that in mind. And if you would like help with repatriating, if you would like, you know, being connected to a local community based archive or you have questions about how this might happen, please reach out. We we're facilitating these things all the time with people and we have a huge network again that would love to work with folks for any marginalized collections. Yeah, go ahead. So, when to act, because this is the one we get all the time. Please give me a rubric because it's scary and your job could absolutely be at risk, right? We know this and at some point I I fear I hope all of this is like a waste of time. I hope that in a year you were like remember when they did that talk how overreacting were we all? Uh but I fear just looking around that it's not. Um and so one of the things is is we wanted to kind of give you a guideline but don't take these as like perfect because at some point I do feel like some of us are going to have to make a decision about our jobs versus the right thing to do. And that has unfortunately happened many times in history. Sometimes people have decided to save the things and it's been great and we've snuck things out and sometimes they haven't and we've lost more than we'll ever recover. So that is just kind of where we are with this. So the digital backup now, now now is the time. I don't care what state you're in. I don't care what institution you're in. Getting backups, getting things outside of your institution is incredibly important. and it's not necessarily easy, but it is something that can be done with less fanfare and we can do it more uh discreetly. So, if you're interested in digital backing up, it's something that you have any kind of capacity to do. Now is the time to do that. Please reach out to us if you would like uh questions with that. And if you're not comfortable sending it off, it could be something as just having a a an external hard drive that every the staff just kind of knows where it is, right? And you're adding things to it. uh the long-term loan if you live in a state with an increasing anti anti-Deia laws and policies. So these are for you know the states that are at the most critical attacks and again not just red states but red states absolutely are there right now. Uh the preemptive repatriation I think again this is everyone. I think this is a really an individual thing where you need to look at your collections and decide where are we, what do we have and what is the legacy of some of these collections here because this may not even be a censorship issue. This might be a right issue, right? Like a community repairing issue for you. So I think it's time to start having those conversations in your staff meetings with your directors like thinking about how you might do this. Um and then emergency relocation. If your institution has begun serious restrictions on marginalized education, so like classes, a shutting down like Texas, all the the UT system has killed almost every one of their DEI uh classes. So that's a huge red flag. And also a bill or a request for an audit, something that specifically attacks libraries, collections, archives. th that's the time if you wait until they're knocking on your door saying we got to get rid of this to get rid of this by tomorrow we will still work with you but it's going to be really really difficult. So if you get into that where you feel like it's happening just be a little be I'd rather us air on the side of caution and me have to return a U-Haul to you. Uh just reach out to us again at contact invisible history um or invisiblehistory.org and then we're also on the Facebook blue sky and Instagram. And we are no longer on Tik Tok because it's sketch. Meta is also sketch. There's no good social media anymore. But >> And is that a lot of >> Is that a lot of information? Yes. Is it depressing? Yes. But we are prepared. >> Like we can do this. This is just about getting us all on the same page. >> Yes. >> And we want to give time for questions. >> Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much. I mean, woof. Content. [laughter] Heavy heavy stuff. But I'm sure all of our listeners are relieved that there are people doing this work, thinking it through, that you know, we're not we're not alone in in this struggle. First, before I um read um from the Q&A, I want to remind everyone that um you can reach out to Josh and Megan directly after this webinar. If you have any questions that you don't feel comfortable asking during the presentation today, I'm putting their contact um email in the chat. just acknowledging that there might be some um you know some questions people would rather not ask in this um in this format. Okay, I'm going to start with some of the um smaller questions then we'll go to the bigger concept questions. Um one question that we have is um how conservators can be involved um in this kind of um in the system that you have set up. Have you worked with conservators before? Does their specific skill set bring something um to this that they should be thinking about? >> I mean, I definitely think so. We're working with two different um conservators right now for two different types of collections. Uh we have a paper, a conservationist who is helping to repair some materials that we had from the 87 March on Washington that have just like been straight through the ringer. Um and then some textile preservation as well with a group that we're working with. So yeah, I think that if your if your field and your expertise are in like the health and management of collections, I think that doing some pro bono work in these at risk collections can really help people because again if something is is feeling flimsy or if something is feeling uh like too delicate, it's always really good for people like us to have someone come in and give us an assessment like what is it here that we really could put out like on a display or in an exhibit and because I I didn't do any conservation work in grad school. I did all archiving, preservation. So, yeah, I think it would be great to be able to offer your services to folks and really give them a sense of like where their collections are in this particular moment. >> And basic workshops, too, like how do you, you know, if you got a community center, how do you make sure that your banners don't rot? You know, just some some real kind of or or if they do, they start to fray, like what you can do about that. Like just real simple things. People love that, too. Like, they're very excited for it right now. Oh God. And talk people out of vinyl banners for God's sake. >> Yes. Preach the gospel of no plastic. >> No plastic. Jesus. [laughter] >> Thank you. Um we have another question. Um a bit of a concern about um physically marking collections. So uh and identifying priority items um like the red dot stickers on on boxes. Um, the concern is that it could potentially have an unintended effect of putting them at higher risk of theft or vandalism or censorship. Um, what are your thoughts on that? I mean, I would think that within the archive itself, you know who your people are, right? You know who your archists are. Um, and in this sense, you're doing this for for you, right? You're doing this for the for the ease and preservation of your collections. And so, this I'm thinking of this as a back-end thing that you work on with your most trusted staff. And so it wouldn't be community forward. Like I don't imagine if someone like from administration rolls in, they're going to like look at a red dot or whatever you decide to use and be like, "Oh no, we should take this out." Like I think this is something that y'all work on together for the ease of your staff and you just keep it. In our collections, we have a I mean it almost sounds so sexy to say we have a dark archive, but like in the dark archive are the collections that don't have any any visible forward thinking metadata. And so we have a key to to for Megan and I to know what those collections are, but nobody else would know that. It's just for us. >> We also have a partner who instead of like labeling them or marking them as some sort of way, they they shifted some stuff around and they had a closet where they were keeping overflow archives and like pre-process and processing and those sorts of things and they just put their most marginalized in that area. Um, so it doesn't like stand out when you if you don't know. It's like if you know, you know, basically. Um, so there's there are ways that you can like mark things that are internal without causing a a scene. Maybe red is not the color. Maybe we should like green. Put a green dot on it. Something that says this is happy. This is fine. >> A scratch and sniff sticker with an apple. >> Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. You know, keeping that knowledge in the note just like if you're marking, you know, priority collections for like an evacuation for fire or something. Um >> yeah yeah yeah absolutely to think in the same vein when it comes to things that might be at risk for other other purpose other reasons like censorship um kind [clears throat] of falls in line with that habit that we are doing anyway another question we have is about um any luck convincing community donors to fund this kind of work if you have any um suggestions about how to fund this especially given that public conceptions of an arch Arive people don't get maybe they don't understand maybe they kind of like the idea but it seems a little bit boring not very flashy you know for funding how do you fund these kinds of endeavors >> I mean there is very little funding it is not a lucrative business to be in um and we know that the Melon Foundation is basically the primary humanities funer currently um so obviously that is something I would say if you have those connections if you can get in there if they're you of funding in your area. Uh I feel very conflicted because you absolutely can create community trust and you can do all of those things, you know, with with your local community to get them to fund it. We get, you know, a lot of donations, but also it is always a burden to ask a marginalized community to pay for its own services. Um if we could do that, we would have done it. You know, this didn't just happen accidentally. Um, and because of the f funding cuts to NE and how we're having to do things and nobody's donating, like Wells Fargo is not sending out gay checks anymore. Um, it is really complicated and it's really, really hard and there isn't a good solution to it. But the good news is is that you can do things for as low cost as you possibly can. Like providing a service, like going and doing a talk, like that can be staff time that's covered by your institution instead of having to go out and buy boxes. if you decide to not be the repository because it's not safe for you. It actually cuts your cost. It increases your time, your effort, and some other things. Um, but the memory keepers is actually probably a really good one because you could make it pretty vague in your writing and not say that it was for a particular marginalized group. It was just a storytelling initiative, a community preservation initiative. I think that's probably the best one if you're going to try to write like a local humanities grant or something. Um, but yeah, I wish I had better news on that front, but as a nonprofit who's also trying to raise money, it is I feel like we're just bleak. I just want to say really quickly that we actually feel really good and positive. Like we feel hopeful or we wouldn't do preservation work. If the future didn't matter, we would never do this work. We have fought these f fights before and we have won them. And if we were all here boohhoohooing about it, we would be doing a disservice to all the radical badasses that sit in our collections. So, while we are talking very honestly about sad things and depressing things, we will win. We will come ahead. And that's part of the issue of what's happening here. Things are getting better. That's why we're in a huge blowback time. Uh so, I just want to throw that out there because I did see some people being sad in the chat. >> Thanks so much, Megan. Yeah, it's I mean bleak overall for heritage [laughter] for any heritage, let alone heritage that's um at risk for different reasons. But thank you for some of those kind of thoughts, especially because I think um someone might immediately think like, oh, let's crowdfund and crowdsource, but to your point, you know, if you're asking marginalized communities to pay for the preservation of their materials, it's not a a very sustainable model, but might not be as ethical, you know, >> as we would like to hope in these scenarios. Um, another question that we have is from a public library at the county level, um, trying to establish a digital collection. Um, they're wondering if there are any steps that they should be considering when building out their systems and policies to protect at risk collections that they might themselves be creating in the near term, or would it be better to partner with external organizations such as yours, I would imagine, for the preservation of these digital collections? It's a great question and I don't think it's an eitheror. Like I actually think you can do both. Um what we always do when we're going to come up with a new policy or if we're trying to do a new program is that we reach out to other archives or libraries that we really like or trust and we ask them to share with us their best practices. I mean right now Megan and I are in a cohort with four other LGBT archives and we're sharing stuff all the time. um you know like we're sharing staffing questions and we're sharing programming ideas with each other and what I know about working in archives is that even though most of us work in the basement of places we're very colleial and so what I would suggest is looking at who has the best policies for what you want to do and then reaching out getting a copy of it and then mimicking those and then asking people like the highest form of flattery right is that you want to use their stuff um and then that doesn't preclude you from working with an organization like invisible histories. I mean, we we're eight and a half years into thinking about these things every single day. And so, you should reach out to us or, you know, other community based archives and see what they're up to and what they're doing um to help you really kind of get a sense of how you could navigate, especially if you're starting from scratch because you can you can start a digital collection fairly easily. Even though long-term maintenance is always a question, like those things can can grow generatively pretty easily. >> And then two things. one in the chat. I put a link to our zenes and guides. There is one about trans collections and what like standards that repositories should have and a lot of those like that includes digital standards and what questions you should be asking, what policies you should have in place. Uh and they're very flexible for other marginalized identities too, particularly living donors. The other thing I want to remind us of is that AI is unavoidable. It's literally everywhere. It is spying on us. It's collecting our data. It is creating um what are they called? Dossas on like literally everything. So if you are not if you don't have your own independent server, which you should uh quite frankly it's very expensive, but you should uh if you're using like Amazon or any of the online storage places, Google, anything like that, they are not it's not private. And so anytime you put anything up there, if it's like an activism preservation, that is at risk. If it's something that is deemed terrorist or whatever, it's actively at risk. And it is incredibly easy and these companies pre-comply with the, you know, ICE and the FBI and all those sorts of people. So just keep that in mind. Is the preservation worth the risk to the community? Is the accessibility worth the risk to the community? And that's a conversation you should have with the community. Ask them what they want, especially for your living donors. That's a really interesting perspective. At least for me, kind of a shift because all of us on this call, I'm sure, are very preservation-minded. That's why we're here. And we think like, oh, preservation first, like that's what we should be doing and then, you know, making it accessible. But to your point, sometimes the very act of collecting things and making them accessible can um put them at risk. So being really aware and conscious of how our actions can also um create implications for if they how and if things get flagged and targeted like we have a role in this to to to consider not just to default to our standard operating procedures for these um materials at risk. >> We have two more minutes. Um I have um one last question. um kind of given the workload involved in this triage type preservation like you were talking like the hackathons and other type things um other initiatives how do you recommend assembling a list of volunteers crusaders who can help um when and if um an emergency situation arises >> I would go ahead and do it now don't wait uh start having those conversations with people uh a good way to do it is not to do general calls we do that because we have a very loyal, hardcore base of pe of supporters. Um, and but if you're an institution, one, it's going to draw attention. This is where word of mouth starts. This is when you go to the local meetings, you find out who are the LGBT centers, where are the civil rights groups, like where are, you know, the BLM chapter, like whatever that is, and you go to them and you start talking to them. Unfortunately, it's slow and it's one-on-one and it is trust building, but it's something that I would go ahead and start now. And then you need to go in offering yourself before you ask for the work. What can I do for y'all? Okay, now I've done it. We have a relationship. Now, how do we work together instead of what can you do for me? Because institutions go in, they put their claws out, they grab, grab, grab, and then when their communities need them the most, they abandon them. That's literally the whole thing that's been happening. So, you have to keep in mind, as awesome as you are, because I know everybody here's amazing, uh, your institution isn't necessarily. And so just remembering that you are representing the arm of the institution and to give before you ask is what I would say. >> What what a thoughtful answer. Okay. We are exactly at the [laughter] top. >> I stopped I stopped talking. I was like yeah >> no no you you just rock stars. I want to thank you both for joining us and for everyone for joining us for your great questions. Please join me in thanking our presenters Josh and Megan. Thank you so much for inspiring us to do the good work today. Um, please I shared a survey link in the chat and you'll get a follow-up email about this survey. To everyone who attended, please please um share your feedback. And I think that's a wrap. We'll see you all for the next COC care program. Thank you so much. Thanks.