Crafting Relevant Community Partnerships Using Archives

Historically, archives have told the stories of the dominant society. Increasingly, archives are exploring and filling some of the silences left by the exclusion of many voices. Oral history is a way of actively collecting stories which may not exist in written form. Both the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s LGBTQ+ Voices: The Queer Omaha Archives Oral History Project and the University of Nebraska at Kearney Archives and Special Collections’ Coming to the Plains: Latin@ Stories in Central Nebraska project engage members of diverse communities in telling their own stories. This session will talk about the origins of each project, the challenges faced, the evolution of the projects, and future pathways. Specific issues discussed will include planning oral history projects, collaborating with communities, faculty, and students on all stages of an oral history project, gaining grant funding to scale up projects, and publicizing and sharing the products of oral histories.