The Connecting Communities Digital Initiative (CCDI) Advisory Board advises CCDI staff on program administration, supports initiative outreach activities, and helps the Library imagine ways that it can deepen connections with Black, Indigenous, Hispanic or Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and other communities of color. Its members include nine professionals ranging from senior scholars to leading librarians, archivists, and early-career professionals in Libraries, Archives, and Museums.
Brian Carpenter is the Curator of Indigenous materials at the American Philosophical Society (APS) Library & Museum.
In this interview post, Brian shares his previous experiences of working with the Library, shares some of his experiences working with Indigenous communities, and offers perspectives on how libraries and archives can make their materials more accessible.
Had you interacted with the Library of Congress prior to joining the CCDI Advisory Board?
Yes, I’ve had the good fortune to work with people at the Library of Congress, mainly through the American Folklife Center (AFC), ever since I started at the APS in 2008. My first project was to digitize the APS Library’s thousands of hours of audio recordings throughout North America. I found that some of those collections were directly related to materials at the AFC. That set in motion a lot of sharing of information between APS and AFC, which has continued ever since. That also led me to learn from key earlier initiatives like the Federal Cylinder Project from the 1980s, which was one of the earliest examples of a non-Native institution working directly with Native nations to reconnect archival materials with them.
You’ve led projects to digitize, catalog, and transcribe materials—for example, recordings of Indigenous languages. How can these digital collections help build meaningful relationships with researchers and communities?
In thinking about this, it helps me to start by keeping at the front of my mind that people have relationships already with collections that are from or about their communities. This is true even if it’s something they haven’t seen before. Sometimes the relationship is very direct: “That’s my grandma on that recording,” or “That’s my uncle in that photograph holding a quilt that my aunt made.” And so on. Or the relationship may be more generally in relation to shared heritage.