This week I reviewed a handful of smaller institutions, some private, religious colleges, a library for libraries, and a county archive:
While all except the Mississippi Library commission had named archives or archival collections, besides a couple of digital collections online, there were no finding aids or collection lists. Digitized items included pictures of historical artifacts, photographs, documents, and university publications like yearbooks. The Mississippi Library Commission houses primarily published materials, but the Mississippi Collection has government documents and periodicals. The Lauderdale County archives were primarily government documents with a few manuscript collections; lists and digitized items include court records.
These smaller Mississippi institutions have been a challenge to research. In some cases, the library webpage had only a few paragraphs of text with no links to catalogs or explicit information about archival holdings. I found one digital repository with a browser search that did not seem to have any links from the institution's webpage. Many of these smaller institutions do have LGBTQ subject headings in the library catalog for published materials, but often do not have institutional theses/dissertations or archival collection finding aids cataloged. In one institution, the archive was just beginning formal establishment.
Last year I read the Society of American Archivist book The Lone Arranger. As I survey Mississippi repositories, the bulk of which are located within a university or college library, I am beginning to appreciate the importance of descriptive access and technology. I have noticed smaller historical programs with fewer resources utilizing free and low-cost technologies to provide access to resources. I am also finding that it is very difficult to find resources that are not cataloged in a searchable platform, do not utilize text-searchable PDF files, and do not have controlled access points. Schools that have gotten grants to digitize content but are not creating finding aids or cataloging collections are not making resources more accessible. I have not spent much time digging into collections that are not explicitly relevant to LGBTQ research, but having tried to open a Word Perfect file (shocked that software is still being produced) or tried to review PDF files that do not have OCR enabled, I appreciate professional standards more. Historical records and papers are not published materials, their content and value need to be recognized and described by archival (or in some cases library or information) professionals to be found by researchers.