In 2023, the Bill Hannon Foundation invited the William H. Hannon Library to apply for a one-year, $150,000 digitization grant focused on telling diverse stories by digitizing and publishing online selected archival collections. We received the funding in May 2023 and completed the project in April 2024. These funds enabled us to significantly expand, enhance, and diversify our digital collections. We have incorporated a range of material fostering wide access to collections that illuminate untold stories, in support of the university’s commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism (DEIA).
We created seven new digital collections and enhanced four digital collections with this grant funding. The array of digital collections (some items seen here) includes student newspapers giving voice to Chicana/o/x and Black students at LMU; religious objects from South and Southeast Asia; early Catholic vestments from Southern California spanning the eras of Spanish, Mexican, and United States governance; World War II-era scrapbooks from a Japanese American family at an internment camp; community- donated oral histories and ephemera documenting the history of the displaced Mexican-American residents in the Chavez Ravine neighborhood in Los Angeles; and one of the university’s signature initiatives, the Inclusive History and Images Project, which seeks to diversify and expand LMU’s historical narrative through community-donated oral histories and photographs. We enhanced four existing digital collections by standardizing metadata records, digitizing new content (including nearly 1,000 issues of The Los Angeles Loyolan), and producing searchable oral history transcripts, making the content more accessible to researchers. In total, we created approximately 1,700 digital objects.
Additionally, the project helped us develop staffing benchmarks and workflows that were critical for moving multiple projects forward simultaneously in a timely manner. Hiring a temporary metadata librarian and digital projects consultant empowered us to significantly expand the number of DEIA digital materials prepared under the grant, demonstrating that the work could be quickly accomplished by adding these critical professionals to the team. With grant funding we hired undergraduate and graduate students to work on various aspects of the project, giving them valuable experience. The focus on digitization processes through the grant project resulted in several other opportunities, such as effective teamwork among library staff and student assistants, transparent and regular communication, improved documentation of workflows and decision-making, and building digital library infrastructure (staffing and technology) in support of the grant and beyond.
The collection has already been the subject of a student-curated exhibition featuring artifacts that showcase student activism during the Black and Chicano student movements; and stories created by faculty, students, and alumni from LMU’s Black, Latino/a and Latinx, Asian American, and Pacific Islander, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ communities.