Dear colleagues,
We have an unusual situation where our archives (and hence our digitization department) is working on an ongoing basis with a current faculty-staff-student group to collect and preserve letters received as part of their mission.
We would like to know whether our situation is unique or rare and in what way, for purposes of a grant application, so I am reaching out to this section (please excuse any duplication of message) to ask if you or anyone you know of has a similar situation, and similar in what way.
Our archives is collecting letters received by the Detainee Allies ( http://detaineeallies.org/), which began as Otay Mesa Allies and was begun by faculty members and students here at San Diego State. With the permission of senders, letters from detainees are being digitized and placed online, heavily redacted, and with lawyer-vetted guidelines in place for protecting the identities of the senders. The digitization project is being (philosophically) backed by the University Library (our employers) and the University administration as a research collection, using University staff to digitize, place online, and archive these records. Once archived, the records will not be available in their unredacted form for decades, except for special permissions or legal requirements.
We have had community partnerships before, and of course we work with Special Collections and Archives to digitize selected records collections or parts of collections generated by University organizations, but this is the first time to my knowledge we have partnered with a University group while the records were being generated, to digitize and place current records online as an intermediate step before being sent to the archives for preservation. Our community partners, such as the Lambda Archives (for LGBTQ community records) have sometimes sent us near-current materials for digitization while preserving the records on their premises, but this is the first time I have been involved with digitizing organizational records that were "coming in hot," as it were, before being processed by an archives.
I am not representing this project or making this request in an official capacity but rather at the request of my colleague who is trying to write a grant proposal, and I hope I am not misrepresenting the project in some aspect or detail. Please contact me individually at arel.lucas@sdsu.edu
Arel
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Victoria Arel Lucas
Metadata and Digital Collections Specialist
San Diego State University
San Diego CA
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