Bringing Important, and Often Marginalized, Primary Source and Special Collections into the Research Workflow

Academic and cultural institutions around the world are stewards of valuable digitized primary source and special collections content that are of great use for teaching, learning and research. More and more faculty want to teach with digitized primary source/special collections, and more and more students need to conduct their research using these same materials, particularly early career researchers. Libraries, community archives, and museums hold vast collections of primary sources, and so what is currently available to users is a proverbial drop in the bucket. A key challenge to realizing much more value from these materials is scale - there needs to be an enormous and continuously growing body of content available digitally. When possible, that content needs to be openly available to researchers all over the world, and should include various perspectives and voices that have traditionally been marginalized. The “reach” of that content in the scholarly ecosystem is also incredibly important. The specific institutional repository in which any one collection is created and published is typically siloed and not in the research workflow. For 25 years, JSTOR has brought together publications—journals, books, and research reports—to serve many needs for the humanities and social sciences. JSTOR is in the research workflow and can be an important channel for making these collections more visible and discoverable. Michele Gibney and Bruce Heterick will talk about the University of Pacific’s reasoning, expectations, and experience with putting a number of their special collections in the JSTOR channel via the Open Community Collections initiative - an effort to explore whether the JSTOR and Portico infrastructure could be shared effectively with institutions, and whether that infrastructure has the potential to provide the same transformative impact to primary source/special/distinctive collections that it had with the backfiles of journals and scholarly monographs. Carolyn Allen and Bruce Heterick will then talk about a new series of collections that are being curated and digitized thru Reveal Digital, which uses a Fund2Open model to seek content representing people and perspectives that are not well-represented in the existing corpus of digitized research materials. Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movements focuses on unearthing and digitizing the histories of civil rights activism by the everyday citizens of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian American/Pacific Islander communities. The program will include up to four collections, targeted for completion by the end of 2025. The collections will be made available on an Open Access basis immediately as they are published—freely available to anyone who wishes to use them. They will be hosted on the JSTOR platform, where they’ll be cross-searchable with other relevant scholarly content and discoverable by scholars, faculty, and students worldwide. Long-term digital preservation will be provided by Portico, ensuring that these important resources will be available to future generations of scholars