The Brown University Library has a long-standing, robust online repository where special collections and other research materials that have been digitized are available to anyone anywhere in the world, especially those unable to visit the reading room in person. The Brown Digital Repository (BDR) is also ideal for hosting and sharing born-digital collections, including the Global Curatorial Project: Unfinished Conversations oral histories and records. 

In the final phases of my role as Project Archivist for the Global Curatorial Project, I not only supported the last curatorial push for the Simmons Center and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture’s joint exhibition, “In Slavery’s Wake—Making Black Freedom in the World,” but also considered how best to serve the patrons and project participants who would want easily findable and accessible versions of the oral history interviews. The most effective way to do that would be to focus on encoding rich metadata into the oral history records and creating proxy versions of interview materials.

Through the dedicated work of the student researchers across several semesters, I was provided with a variety of local and controlled subject headings that touched upon topics of interest within the oral histories. By consistently applying these headings to the files uploaded into the BDR, the searchability of the materials was increased. This way, users are able to search for the materials specifically, more general topics and connect them with materials across series within the collection, or locate them from a search engine like Google. Specific and rich metadata widens the targeted audience and expands how researchers find and share the collection.

Besides findability, the BDR offers patrons and participants the ability to reliably interact with the interviews and related materials in perpetuity. It is a springboard for researchers to delve deeper into the Global Curatorial Project: Unfinished Conversations oral histories and records (Ms.2022.010), as there are many more environmental materials and photographs available in the larger collection through request at hay@brown.edu.