Dear All,
Please join us for the second public online talk of 2025 of the Society of American Archivists' (SAA) Crisis, Disaster, and Tragedy Response Working Group (CDTRWG).
CDTRWG maintains and updates SAA's Documenting in Times of Crisis: A Resource Kit; develops and provides immediate and ongoing resources and response assistance to archivists, allied cultural heritage professionals, and their communities in times of tragedies, disasters, or other crises; and builds partnerships with organizations focused on relief efforts and cultural stewardship and preservation. As part of that partnership building, we are conducting a series of public talks in 2025 to hear about related work.
Connect to Collect: Preserving Social Digital Photography Through Collaboration and Community Engagement
Karolina Hedström, Stockholm County Museum, Sweden and Bente Jensen, Aalborg City Archives, Denmark
Wednesday, May 14th, 2025, 11am EDT (8am PDT; 4pm BST)
Register for the event
Summary
This talk will present the Connect to Collect, a collaborative network of museums and archives dedicated to collecting and preserving social digital photography. Through the development of the innovative web app Connect to Collect, we aim to explore new methods for gathering and curating this vital form of contemporary heritage.
Our current project emphasizes community engagement, employing citizen science approaches to address contemporary themes such as social and ecological sustainability, place, identity and sudden traumatic events (such as the 2017 Stockholm Terrorist Attack). Everyday digital photography-often shared on social media-represents a powerful documentation of modern society from the perspective of citizens and communities. Together, Nordic museums and archives involved in this initiative are pioneering participatory strategies to preserve this invaluable cultural heritage.
Biographies
Karolina Hedström is a photo antiquarian and archivist at the Stockholm County Museum. With an academic foundation in photography, archival science, and ethnology, she brings over 15 years of experience in managing and curating picture archives. Currently, her role centers on collecting contemporary photographs from the public and looking at innovative new methodologies for documenting modern life.
Bente Jensen is an archivist at Aalborg City Archives in Denmark. She has worked with a special focus on how the change to digital media will affect the methods and strategies of archives especially related to the visual holdings. Bente participated in the Nordic research project Collecting Social Photo project (CoSoPho, 2017-2021). The project team published the anthology: Connect to Collect, Approaches to Collecting Social Digital Photography in Museums and Archives (2020), the full text of which is available online.
A recording of the talk will be available on the CDTRWG's website shortly after the event.
Best wishes,
Chrystal
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Chrystal Carpenter
Head, Special Collections and Archives
Virginia Commonwealth University
Henrico VA
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