The Society of American Archivists, UIUC Student Chapter and the Community Informatics Club will take a trip to the Early American Museum, the Heritage Center of Champaign County, to assist the museum with a very important collection, the Doris K. Wylie Hoskins Archive on Cultural Diversity. We will probably leave GSLIS around 12:40 to head to Mahomet. E-mail Noah Lenstra if you are interested so that we can coordinate transportation, carpools, etc.
More information on how this collection was acquired, and how it represents an important history of collaboration between the Early American Museum and a number of community organizations that represent Champaign County's African-American Museum, can be found below.
Briefly, the collection was amassed by the late Doris Hoskins, a local historian from North Champaign who collected the material remnants of her community. The collection includes photographs, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, yearbooks, and more. The museum staff have deep emotional ties to the collection and to their history with Ms. Hoskins, but feel that they need assistance to make the collection more accessible, both for internal use and for external use (more below on the many projects that have already taken advantage of the collection).
To address this need, during this trip participants will have the opportunity to learn more about the collection, the community it represents, the emotional and evidential importance of the collection. Furthermore, participants will learn more about the history of the Early American Museum's community engagement, how this engagement lead to the acquisition of the collection, and how this engagement leaves the museum emotionally/ethically responsible for the collection in ways that go beyond what we usually consider when we take about responsibility for collection care.
Following this tour, we will dive into the collection to get a sense of its content. Finally, as a group we will, with staff from the Museum, discuss strategies and ideas about how to manage the collection in a way that will make it more accessible to the community it represents. Numerous individuals (but no archivists) have already done piece-meal work on the collection, but what the museum really would like is help developing a strategy that can move beyond piece-meal processing to a holistic processing plan. In any case, some ideas for future work (but certainly not all) proposed by Cheryl Kennedy, the director of the museum, include the below. As you can see from the diversity of projects, this partnership offers great opportunities for students interested in a variety of topics – from archives to community informatics to historical research to preservation to more.
1) Reviewing how things are currently organized and making them more user friendly
2) Working with an old scrapbook of articles on Urban Renewal
3) Working with the 3-ring binder with information on Project 500 at the U of I
4) Scanning photos so that originals could be returned to families
5) Maybe even meeting with some of the families to document what is in the photo albums and determine what is of value for the archive
For background information see:
http://www.prairienet.org/years/
http://www.earlyamericanmuseum.org/afam.htm
http://earlyamericanmuseum.org/legacyhome.htm
http://earlyamericanmuseum.org/legacy2home.htm
Want to volunteer in a public library and gain valuable experience serving patrons? Volunteers are currently needed at the Urbana Free Library to help in the public computing lab. Volunteers will assist patrons in the lab with questions related to using a computer, setting up e-mail, conducting an internet search, and so much more. If you're a graduate student than you've got what it takes. Contact srrodger@illinois.edu to find out more and sign up! 
Come help us work with the Children’s Book Collection at the Center for Women in Transition. We’ll be designing the center a new organization schema and helping them to create new reading spaces. A collaborative effort between CI club and the ALA outreach group. Food will be served and for those with cataloging experience this will be a chance to put your creative skills to the test!
Return of the movie night social. Details to be announced closer to the date.
