By Cyrus Brewer
As the Curator of Archives and Library Resources at the IU Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (IUMAA), Kelsey Grimm (MLS IU 2015) wears many hats.
As the steward of the museum’s library and archival collections, Grimm oversees the preservation and organization of diverse materials such as the Great Lakes-Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection (also known as the GLOVE), the Eli Lilly Archaeology Papers, and the Wanamaker Collection of American Indian Photographs – just to name a few. She is also responsible for connecting students, researchers, and descendent communities to these materials through means such as outreach, exhibitions, and the digitization of the Reading Room’s collections. Digitization is an invaluable tool for increasing discoverability and accessibility, but the process of digitizing materials is not as simple as it might seem. When the collections you care for contain sensitive materials, the prospect of digitization becomes even more complex.
Grimm received her MLS from IU in 2015 and began working part-time at the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, which would later merge with the Mathers Museum of World Cultures in 2019 to become the IUMAA. Her initial role was to increase the accessibility of the institution’s library and archive collections.
“It had been essentially a private library for the longest time,” Grimm said, “but it wasn’t discoverable in IUCAT or through any of the public discovery systems that IU uses… even just the basics of, like, having a catalog, or organizing the collection… So, inventorying, organizing – those were the big projects, initially.”
As time has gone on, however, Grimm has taken on new responsibilities.
“I help facilitate research access for people who need some of the resources here, or need help navigating the resources here,” she said. One way that Grimm facilitates such access is through digitization efforts. One of the most well-used collections at the Reading Room is the GLOVE, which documents the history and land use of indigenous groups from the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region between the 1600s and the late 1900s.
“Descendent communities want access to that material,” Grimm explained. “It is a history of their tribe from point of contact to the twentieth century – yes, through a Euro-American lens, but still – it’s a lot of documentation about their tribe. Organized chronologically, even!” The IUMAA has gone on to work with Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Eastern Shawnee Tribe, and Wyandotte Nation in order to digitize portions of the GLOVE that are relevant to each group’s history, in order to ensure that these communities have freely-accessible copies of these resources.
“Digitization is kind of something that I’m always thinking about, because it helps with distance research and connecting with community,” explained Grimm. “A lot of the indigenous communities that call these lands home, traditionally, are not housed in this area. A lot of them are in Oklahoma, and that’s a nine-hour trip by car. So in order for us to work with them, we either pay for travel, or we find a way to digitize.” One of the upcoming digitization projects Grimm is planning is the total digitization of the Wanamaker Collection – which includes over 8,000 photographs and 25,000 documents from the turn of the 20th century – into an online resource with a finding aid. The collection primarily documents life in Native American communities from 1908 through 1921, viewed through the lens of photographer Joseph K. Dixon throughout his work for the Wanamaker expeditions.
“He realized at the time – even then, right? – that the reservations were in poor condition. So in the pictures and through the documentation, he shifts his perspective from a white person’s view of what brown bodies ‘should’ look like, to documenting the reservations and the people who live there as they are,” Grimm said.
The Wanamaker Collection is one of IUMAA’s most used collections, and the images in this collection have largely been digitized already; however, the documents surrounding these images have not been digitized, and the collection as a whole is not very accessible. In an effort to remedy this, IUMAA is currently working with The Sequoyah National Research Center’s Modern Warriors of World War I project in order to digitize the Wanamaker Collection’s documents on Native Americans who served in World War I. Furthermore, IUMAA intends to work with relevant communities in order to update metadata with more appropriate terms and nomenclature.
“The words used to describe people have changed in a hundred years,” says Grimm. “Some of the words that Dixon used were not words that the people would use to describe themselves… formal nations have different names for what they would call themselves than what a white person may have called them historically. So, we want to update this nomenclature and capture all of that… and to improve the accessibility and discoverability for the communities that need access to it.”
Other work has been done in the past to digitize historic images from the Archaeology Collection, which were made publicly available through the internet – with the exception of images of human burials, which would not be appropriate to share publicly. In the time that has passed since this project, however, new regulations have been introduced through NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) – and, in compliance with these regulations, the Museum has taken down all images of any objects that have not yet been consulted on with relevant community consultants.
Grimm describes it well: “That’s something that, when I graduated from library school ten years ago, we weren’t talking about. It was kind of open-access, everything. Like, ‘digitize it, put it online, make it open-access.’ And that’s great in theory, except for when we haven’t had these conversations about power, and authority, and colonialism. We’ve been having some of these conversations at the museum of… is it right to make it open-access when it’s not our material, right? If it’s not our ancestors who were being uncovered and taken out of their resting places. So, that’s been an interesting part of the digitization that we’ve been working into the conversation.”
These ethical concerns – questions about who gets to decide whether something should be digitized or shared – compound with concerns of feasibility.
“One of the things that I like to tell people who aren’t in this discipline necessarily, is: When you digitize something, you’re essentially duplicating the whole collection,” explains Grimm. “We have a better understanding of how to care for the physical object, and oftentimes the digital facsimile of it is more vulnerable; it’s more fragile than that physical object. And now we have two objects to care for, and different needs for both of them!” Grimm also highlighted the environmental impacts of digitization, and particularly of the data centers which so often house digital facsimiles of documents on servers.
“So I think that digitization is great for connecting, and collaborating, and creating new things,” she said, “but we should also think about why we’re digitizing, who gets to make that decision, and what are the impacts of that – physically as well as intellectually.”
The IUMAA is open Tuesday to Friday from 10AM to 5:30PM, and Saturdays from 12PM to 5:30PM. In addition to the museum’s other exhibits on display, visitors to the Reading Room can currently see Megajeff – a digitally fabricated skeleton of Indiana University’s lost Megalonyx jeffersonii (giant ground sloth) specimen.
Megajeff is currently visiting the museum due to a partnership with the Indiana Geological and Water Survey. Interested in learning more? Check out IGWS’s digital exhibit, Resurrecting Megajeff: Uncovering the Hidden History of IU’s lost Megalonyx jeffersonii.