Join us on Friday, September 18th at 1:00 pm CT for the next WiLSWorld Shorts as staff and interns from America’s Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM) in Milwaukee share about their work to digitize and share the museum’s collections.
This summer, a team of ABHM interns has been digitizing materials that document Black community history in Milwaukee, from the Beckum Stapleton Little League to oral histories with museum stakeholders. Bringing these hidden gems online expands access to stories that might otherwise stay tucked away in boxes, especially as the museum prepares to move its collections to a new home. They have also been working on an exhibit with the Wisconsin Black Historical Society focused on the types of racist memorabilia that both museums are charged with collecting. This has posed difficult questions about how much of this material museums should collect, what people should do with the racist memorabilia they inherit, and how to preserve and share these artifacts without reinforcing stereotypes.
Mia Phifer, Senior Education, Collections, and Outreach Coordinator, and members of the intern team will share what they’ve learned along the way: how they’ve built and sustained trust with donors and community members whose stories these collections hold, and what it means to steward and share difficult history. They’ll also touch on how support from the Recollection Wisconsin Digitization Initiative and the WiLS Ideas to Action Fund helped this work take root.
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