Kentucky Hispanic Heritage Project Showcase

This project showcase will introduce and discuss the current work of the Kentucky Hispanic Heritage Project (khhp.org), an open-access bilingual digital space dedicated to the history, culture, achievements, and contemporary experience of people of Hispanic descent living in Kentucky. From the start, our approach to this project has been informed by the belief that documenting Hispanic heritage, culture, and placemaking will increase opportunities, support, and equity for those whose collective history we seek to tell. At the three-year mark of this project we have identified, indexed, and tagged over 400 sources that fall into the categories of academic research, statistical and demographic information, oral history projects, creative and personal narrative, journalism, and Spanish-language media outlets. The site provides users with a variety of ways to search and browse these references, both in English and Spanish. We have also identified countless digital sources that are in peril of disappearing. While there are a number of cultural and governmental organizations that do important work to promote and celebrate Hispanic culture and heritage in the state, there is no other organization that seeks to document, disseminate, and preserve this history as KHHP does. In this showcase, project collaborators will discuss current efforts to improve the community responsiveness and accessibility of the site through the expansion of bilingual search capabilities and a survey to generate community feedback and input. Identifying more clearly who might use these resources, and how, will help us organize the site and prioritize the collection of sources in ways that support grant writing, research, programming, policy-making, and academic instruction that is better informed and more representative of the diverse experiences and histories that make up Hispanic heritage in Kentucky.