The Native American Educational Services College Digital Library Project

The Native American Educational Services (NAES) College Digital Library Project is a metadata and meta-data project situated in Native American & Indigenous Studies and Library & Information Science that seeks to form a process and pedagogy around the data curation of at-risk community-based research collections. The core pieces of the project include: 1. The technical, ethical, and contextual data curation of our project data set, composed of digitized library catalog cards from the Native American Education Service (NAES) urban American Indian college in Chicago (1974-2005). Due to the cards’ inconsistent layout, manual curation of the digital catalog is necessary to compile and analyze their data. Founded in 1974, NAES lost its accreditation in 2005. Its library’s holdings and card catalog currently reside in a storage unit rented by the American Indian Association of Illinois (formed by the former NAES president, Dorene Wiese). As part of a collaboration among Wisecup, Northwestern Libraries, and AIAI, in 2018 the Libraries digitized the card catalog representing the NAES library holdings. 2. A multimodal digital humanities website presenting historical and cultural contexts of the project data (the digitized catalog cards) and the collection it represents for community use, Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) scholarship, and the general public. 3. A white paper exploring issues of data sovereignty, academic library curation of Native collections and/as data, NAIS theory and methods, as well as replicable processes, pedagogy, and lessons learned from the example of the project data. 4. A project-concluding symposium presenting the collaborative work of the project—data curation, digital storytelling, theoretical implications—to scholars and members of the public, both Native American and non-Native.