Abstract
“Building Kentucky's Archives and Collections,” a panel at the 2018 Kentucky Jewish History Symposium, featured four presentations by professional archivists on their efforts to cultivate Jewish collections and audiences at their historical societies and university libraries. Following the presentations, moderator Rabbi Dr. Gary P. Zola, executive director of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, opened the Q&A section by enumerating the dangers that await Jewish historical materials housed in non-Jewish archives. Unless deposited at Jewish institutions and stewarded by archivists specially trained in Jewish history, he worried, such history risks being “lost” either through neglect or misapprehension. This anxiety over the preservation of Jewish history is telling for it cuts straight to core ideological and methodological debates on archiving minority history in general and Jewish history in particular: To whom does Jewish history matter? Where does it belong? Can Jewish communities trust non-Jewish institutions to responsibly store, organize, and facilitate access to their histories? The answers posited by Zola and the American Jewish Archives are that Jewish history matters primarily to Jews, belongs in Jewish institutions, and should not be entrusted to non-Jewish ones. In this essay, the Jewish and non-Jewish Kentucky archivists on that panel argue otherwise: that Jewish history matters to local histories; that its preservation should be a shared endeavor founded on mutual respect between a minority community and area archival institutions; and finally, that this approach to collecting Jewish history offers immense intellectual and logistical benefits for Jews and non-Jews alike.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 233-251 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Journal of Jewish Identities |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2020 The Author(s).
Funding
Oral histories gained importance as valuable primary source material during the wave of new history in the 1970s, and the UARC was at the forefront of this trend. In the spring of 1978, UARC received a grant from the Kentucky Oral History Commission (KOHC) to support the Jewish History Project through the collection of more interviews. Founded in 1976 as a bicentennial commission and then formalized as a state-funded agency in 1982, KOHC has consistently included voices from outside the great (white) men of history.24 This institution has provided not only financial support for collections but also strategies for the long-term preservation of and access to their materials. KOHC serves as repository and provides guidance on project creation and, since 2012, has mandated that any KOHC products must be deposited in an accredited repository with robust, long-term digital preservation policies and procedures. (The OHC at UofL has been accredited since 2013.) Originally recorded on analog cassette, the Jewish oral histories from the 1970s and a subsequent round of interviews in 1991 have since been digitized and catalogued by archivists at UARC (renamed Archives and Special Collections in 2013), according to successive iterations of best practices. Nevertheless, user-friendly online access to them has remained elusive. In the spring 2017, Ranen Omer-Sherman, JHFE Endowed Chair of Judaic Studies at the University of Louisville, brought University of Kentucky Jewish Studies and Zantker Charitable Foundation professor Janice W. Fern-heimer to campus to speak about Jewish oral history as part of his Jewish Studies Colloquium series. Inspired by the presentation, Heather Fox, the director of the OHC, successfully applied to the JHFE for a grant to digitize, transcribe, and index the Louisville Jewish oral histories from 1977–1978 and 1991. As a result, in June 2018, the OHC launched a new website that integrated the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), which facilitates oral history research for anyone with an internet connection. Spearheaded by Doug ?oyd, director of the Louie ?. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, OHMS is an open-source indexing tool for time-based media that allows researchers to pinpoint passages in the audio or video recording relevant to their research.25 The OHMS application creates an XML file that contains timecodes, the full text of a transcribed interview, and administrative and descriptive metadata, and the OHMS viewer pulls together the text and audio. Synchronized interviews are full-text searchable, and indexed interviews facilitate searching through the creation of segments based on topical changes within the interview. An OHMS indexer can also add keywords, Library of Congress Subject Headings, and geospatial coordinates.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| UARC | |
| Kentucky Oral History Commission |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- History and Philosophy of Science
- Literature and Literary Theory
- Philosophy
- Religious studies