Collecting Stories of the US Freedom Struggle: A Case Study in Production, Preservation and Access from the US National Library

The Civil Rights History Project, a national mandate to collect interviews with veterans of the freedom struggle in the 195os to the 60s, has provided the Library of Congress with many opportunities and challenges in the course of collecting and disseminating the materials to worldwide audiences. The project director for the Library shares the institution's experiences and discusses issues and cautions to be aware of before undertaking such collecting projects, pertaining to the areas of born-digital capture, preservation and metadata workflows and access. Sample interviews and a look at the back-end of an innovative collaborative cataloging portal developed for the project will be displayed during the course of the presentation.