Two departments in the UWM Libraries received grants this fall to extend community engagement efforts.
Digital Collections & Initiatives, in collaboration with the UWM Roberto Hernandez Center, was awarded a major grant from Wisconsin Humanities for a podcast based on 14 oral histories of prominent members of the Hispanic community who have ties to the university.
The oral histories were collected in 2020 and 2021 by the Libraries’ Archives on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the RHC.
The new podcast project, Hispanic Oral Latino Archives (HOLA), will create a set of pilot podcasts based on themes emerging from the oral history interviews and share them with teachers and students in Milwaukee for feedback and further development.
An interview of the two project managers, Ann Hanlon, head of DC&I, and Alberto Maldonado, RHC director, will be broadcast on WUWM’s Lake Effect at noon on November 29, 2022.
The second grant, shared by the Archives and Recollection Wisconsin, is from the Digital Public Library of America, in support of racial equity projects in archives.
The grant funding will underwrite a liaison between the Archives and Milwaukee’s women and nonbinary artist community to help develop a recently acquired collection of artists’ papers, the Milwaukee Women’s Art Library. Local artist and community activist Celeste Contreras has been hired to fill the temporary position.
Derek Webb, head of the Archives, recently contributed a blog post about the Digital Equity Project grant on the DPLA website.
–Steve Burnham