Grant a collaboration between Schurz Library and St. Joseph County Public Library to digitize local African American history materials

University Archivist and Associate Librarian Alison Stankrauff and Joe Sipocz, Manager of Local & Family History Services at the St. Joseph Public Library (and adjunct Q110 instructor at IU South Bend), have received a 2014 Indiana Memory Digitization Grant for their project proposal entitled, "St. Joseph County African American History Collection."

Their award of $10,000 will be used to digitize photographs, documents and newspapers held by the St. Joseph County Public Library, IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center, and Franklin D. Schurz Library that tell the story of African Americans in St. Joseph County.  

 

"By unifying these collections and making them accessible online, researchers, students, and the general public will be able to easily discover and delve into the history and impact of African Americans in our region," said IU South Bend Dean of Library Services Vicki Bloom.  

 

Stankrauff was approached by Sipocz about applying for the grant as a way to preserve the content of both IU South Bend's Civil Rights Heritage Center Collections and the materials in the St. Joseph County Public Library's Local and Family History Services department. 

 

Once the materials are digitized, they will be made available to the public through the public library's Michiana Memory website. As part of the grant, the materials will also become part of the Indiana Memory collection. Stankrauff and Sipocz also hope to make the site part of the Digital Public Library of America. A partial list of materials to be digitized can be found here.

 

The grant will allow for the Library to hire one or more students to work on the project, providing the student with valuable archival experience. Civil Rights Heritage Center Curator George Garner is also working with Stankrauff and Sipocz on the project.

 

Graduate student publication first of several campus open access publications

Thanks to a partnership between Scholarly Communications Librarian Craig Finlay and graduate student and journal editor Stephanie Foreman, the Graduate Research Journal has become the first IU South Bend open access ScholarWorks publication. The journal can be read at: http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/iusbgrj

"Stephanie was very proactive in getting an online, open access journal set up," said Finlay. "Print editions are wonderful, but their weakness is reach -- it's necessarily limited to the number of issues you have printed. Publishing online, in particular publishing open access online, is essential to increasing discoverability, visibility and reach of research. It's been proven that publishing in an open access journal provides a citation advantage for authors."

Journals published through IU ScholarWorks have the advantage of being easily discovered on Google Scholar, thanks to the hard of work of Schurz Library catalogers.

"Through our creation of the Institutional Repository (IR), we've already placed some items online that are showing up on the Google Scholar searches," said Finlay. Scott Opasik and Steve Sigety in cataloging do a fantastic job of applying metadata to the items in the IR, making them easily locatable."

The ease of finding articles that have been published through ScholarWorks was what helped Foreman decide to go with the open access format.

"The important factor for my decision was the fact that graduate students use publications to apply for other programs later [and] using ScholarWorks, the author can attach a link to their CV, allowing schools to view their work," she said.

Finlay encourages faculty journal advisors and student editors to consider the possibilities of open access publishing and to contact him for more information.

"It's a fantastic experience," he said. "The only cost is time."  

To learn more about open access, contact Craig Finlay. To learn more about the Graduate Research Journal, contact Stephanie Foreman. 

 

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