Digitizing oral histories to help honour the diversity of America's servicewomen
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Read how Dorian Bell and his team digitised oral histories and processed metadata outside of the standard format for the Military Women's Memorial on behalf of a new 2022 traveling exhibition entitled, “The Colour of Freedom: Honouring the Diversity of America’s Servicewomen.”
“The history of minority women in the military is often untold and underrepresented,” said Britta Granrud, Director of Collections and Curator for the Military Women’s Memorial. “Diversity is our strength and women of colour have been, and continue to play, integral roles in our nation’s military and beyond.”
For example, concerning the original proof of concept, the Memorial wanted us to take all their items and extract metadata from the physical elements, as well as capture images of their content, in our Moonachie Studio.
Because of the Memorial’s philanthropic grant partnership with our company through the Living Legacy Initiative, our Iron Mountain Media and Archival Services team was brought in to lend our expertise to digitize oral histories in legacy formats and to process their metadata. During our introductory calls, Britta explained the results of our work would become the basis of their new 2022 traveling exhibition entitled, “The Colour of Freedom: Honouring the Diversity of America’s Servicewomen.” We also learned that the exhibition - which is now open - would bring attention to the trials and triumphs of African-American servicewomen, in particular.
I felt proud to project manage this project on behalf of the Memorial, which initially started as a request for a proof of concept for digitizing at risk media containing servicewomen oral histories and gathering metadata for their collection. The POC helped the Memorial team identify and add essential descriptive fields outside of the standard format and define deliverables for the file package delivery.
