Department of English
- Monday, October 21, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Class of 1978 Pavilion, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections on the 6th floor of the University of Pennsylvania's Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center
We are excited to welcome Dorothy Berry (National Museum of African American History and Culture), for a talk titled: “Reading a Digital Collection: The Johnson Publishing Company Archive in Process.”
Dorothy Berry writes:
Debates around the role of digitized special collections and archives often end in metaphysical concern about losing the physical experience of holding an object. Digital access is convenient and potentially reaches a broader audience, but the affective response of touching the book someone owned, or rifling through the letters someone wrote is felt as quite different from scrolling on a computer. This talk considers these concerns in relation to one of the largest records of Black popular culture in the twentieth century: the Johnson Publishing Company Archive. The Johnson Publishing Company Archive is a digital collection co-stewarded by the Getty Research Institute and the National Museum of African American History and Culture and will be shared with the public on a digital first access model. The project, still in process, provides an object lesson in the complications of digitization, material texts, and different kinds of access.
Dorothy Berry currently serves as the Digital Curator for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Her scholarly work focuses on the broad definitions of and access to Black archives and collections. Working as an archivist and digital special collections expert, she has led projects to more ethically describe and make discoverable archival collections. She received Library Journal’s “Movers and Shakers” award, as well as the Mark A. Greene Emerging Leader and Council Exemplary Service Awards from the Society of American Archivists. Her writing can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Public Domain Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, as well as with academic publishers.