The Civil Rights History of Baltimore: MCHC Part 1

 

Public History uses historical skills and getting around communities to learn and study history. I learned public history by making history with people who know and understand the field. From my experience doing a public history summer internship with the UMBC history department, I could fill some gaps in history that I didn’t know about history by doing fieldwork and conducting oral history interviews of those who were a part of the Freddie Gray uprising in Baltimore. The boot camp internship is a history internship, designed as a way for students to practice the work of public historians and the aspect of oral history and why it is essential for us to make history.

The Maryland Center for History and Culture (MCHC) is the internship's location; It was founded in March of 1844.it is an excellent place of history and has a lot of documents that historians can use to conduct a research projects, etc. As the museum was in the process of creating a civil rights exhibition, the translation of interviews done about the history of the Civil rights movement in Baltimore was needed as a way for the public and citizens to learn more about the history of Baltimore.

The internship was designed as a way for students to work on interviews that were done in the past, to create short summaries for the public to see if they have an interest in a specific person. It further taught us how to do the transcription and translation of old interviews as a way for the public to have easy access to information. It was the McKeldin-Jackson Project Oral History Collection that we were working on to create short summaries for the community to have an interest in it. The use of audio recordings to craft a story or a summary can be challenging, and sometimes you might perhaps record information that might not be the truth or not to the extent of what the interviewee said. This internship is an excellent opportunity for history students to practice history and the different ways that historians make history. We tend to associate just being behind a desk with the study of history, but there are many ways that we make history. Fieldwork and the inducting of an oral interview are methods that the internship was teaching us in a sense for us to be great historians in the future.

An Archival Conundrum

I am nearing the finish line. At least, the finish line of uploading our backlog of photographs onto the baltimoreuprising2015.org website. When the Maryland Historical Society (MdHS) originally put out the call for photographs, they received an overwhelming response, but they had nowhere to put the astounding contributions. Contributors were instructed to send images to MdHS via dropbox. When I arrived on the scene, the Historical Society dropbox had over a thousand images shared to their account. The first things I had to do when I began my work, was download the files off dropbox to a physical hard drive and catalog each person's contributions and corresponding metadata. In a couple of days, I was able to do this. The Hard drive contained every contribution and were organized into files for each contributor. Once all of the images were stored offline and documented, I had to start uploading those images to the baltimoreuprising2015.org website.

The baltimoreuprising2015.org site is built using Omeka. Omeka is a Content Management System (CMS). Collections, series, and exhibits can all be constructed through Omeka, but it all starts with a digital archive of “items” stored on the Omeka site. For each photograph on the hard drive, I had to upload it to the website and provide the necessary metadata such as description, title, creator, date, etcetera. Making sure each image, audio file, or video is uploaded correctly, has the correct provenance information, and is organized within the archive in a way that it can be retrieved by users has been my most time consuming task.

I am pleased with the number of contributors and the magnitude of the contributions. The size of the archive is larger than my most optimistic projections at the start. It is not enough, however, for the archive to simply be large. It also must be usable. Most descriptions, titles, and subjects for items that were provided by contributors were vague and confusing. There was little continuity from one collection to the next, which made it difficult for the whole archive to be searched. Although we wanted to preserve the artistic intention of the content creators, we also want the site to be a resource. Our compromise has been to keep the title and description of photos how the creator indicated, but to limit the subjects of items to a controlled vocabulary. Now, when users contribute to the archive, they have to select from a limited list of subjects. What this means for researchers is that they can click on the subject of any one item, and be able to see all the items with that same subject.

Our decision to limit subjects at first might seem minute, but it actually represents a continuous struggle for archives both digital and physical. What is the right balance between preservation and accessibility? In one sense, the item subject could be seen as an important interpretive component that needs to be preserved to reflect the contributors complete artistic vision. On the other hand, the purpose of preservation is almost always to ensure long term usefulness for future generations. Consistent categories and labels are the only way a repository of almost 2,000 items can be made searchable for future users. Ultimately, we tried to find a balance between the two ideals, but tended to favor access.