Spring 2021 Projects Update
April 6, 2021
Back when we relaunched as Shift Collective in August, we were already full steam into a year of work to promote equity in the cultural, academic and cultural memory spaces. While it may be a while before we can share case studies like you see in our portfolio pages, we wanted to at least let you know what we’ve been up to, together with our quickly growing collective, and in addition to supporting our continued core programs. We’d love to have you join us as we continue to support and design community-driven initiatives to boost social, cultural and resource equity.
Archiving the Black Web National Forum. We’re proud to be a partner in this national forum funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The April 29-30 event will focus on strategies for collecting and preserving Black history and culture online as well as developing a community of practice for Black cultural memory organizations and practitioners interested in web archiving. Read more and register here.
Continuing support of the Manitos Community Memory Project. Thanks to the support of an NEH Cares Grant and the New Mexico Humanities Council, we’re able to continue to provide strategic and technical support for the Manitos Community Memory Project this year, while they continue to expand with an additional $970k grant from the Mellon Foundation.
James Madison University and Furious Flower Poetry Center. We’re leading design workshops with JMU Libraries and the internationally renowned Black poetry center, Furious Flower, to develop and disseminate a new model for integrated library and educational technologies support of a living, academic center for the arts with digital archives, research and performance components. The project also seeks to highlight opportunities to support and amplify similar centers and programs at predominantly white institutions. You can read more here.
Alliance for Cultural Equity. Ashé Cultural Arts Center is leading a collaboration of the New Orleans Data Center, Shift Collective, Helicon Collaborative, and Southern University at New Orleans in conducting a study with a cohort of local organizations to report on the role small museums and archives focused on preserving the histories and culture of marginalized people play in the welfare of their communities, the value they bring to their local cultural economy, and potential models for their financial sustainability. Read more about the project here.
Survey on Community-Based Archives for NHPRC. We recently completed a research project building on our Architecting Sustainable Futures convening in 2018 to better understand the breadth of diverse collections held in small, community-based archives in the US. This report is part of our effort to facilitate and advocate for increased direct funding to cultural memory organizations in diverse communities. Access the full report here.
Save the Black Press. The Google News Initiative (GNI) Innovation Challenge has awarded Black Voice News (BVN) $300k in support of “Save the Black Press,” a bold call to action to innovate revenue and sustainability solutions at Black news organizations through the creation of the Data Access and Content Discovery Hub. We’re proud to be a partner in this project, along with AVP and Grey Alien Technologies.
Organizational Strategy and Project Planning. We’re increasingly helping other organizations find ways to address structural inequity in their field, discover new and creative paths forward, and diversify revenue streams through our consulting work.
Community Engagement on a National Finding Aid Network. In partnership with California Digital Library, Chain Bridge Group, OCLC, and the University of Virginia Library (UVA), and in close partnership with statewide/regional finding aid aggregators and LYRASIS (ArchivesSpace), we are supporting efforts to support the sharing and discovery of archival materials, especially on the level of community-based archives. Read more here.
Reimagine Descriptive Workflows. We’re working with OCLC to host an international convening to explore how to remove barriers to increase the creation and scaling of representative and anti-racist metadata description in library and archive systems. Read more here.
Historypin. Earlier this year we announced that we received a two-year, $375k award from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue to advance the Historypin platform and take this project into another decade of community-engaged storytelling around local history. In addition to that work, we continue to roll out more language compatibility to support local projects globally, adding Arabic and Hebrew to the already available Spanish and French sites.