Sweeney Family Papers

Preservation and Digital Library Project

My early education in visual literacy came from looking at the family photo albums. Luckily, my late father chronicled his life, leaving a collection of 150 scrapbooks, vital documents, 16mm films, and daily journals. These included the mundane documentation of birthdays, to weddings and family reunions, from Texas road trips to travels around the world. They were the tales of adventure that I would browse on rainy days and the lasting records of my family’s history.

A few years ago I realized this collection was deteriorating and decided I had to preserve it before it was too late. Processing the collection was was something I wanted to do right. And the more I explored how to approach it, the more I wanted to learn how professional archivists in special collections did it.

You see I love looking at photographs and making connections. The collection contains not only my family history in images and records, but a trove of images related to any topic. It is my parent’s story, and the well from which I could draw the details my own story.

So after 15 years in Austin, I decided to engage with the resources of The University of Texas as a TOWER Fellow, to design a curriculum to serve my archival project. My goal was to learn how to preserve my collection and create a digital library to share it. The scale of the collection made it overwhelming but bt's a problem many people have. I took mostly graduate level classes all in the School of Information and explored the many special collections that reside on campus. I was interested in the high level whys as well as the technical details of how.

I started by doing a preservation assessment to understand proper care and handling of different formats and media, and how to handle emergencies. I started to identify the items that were deteriorating, and prioritize their care. I began reformatting home movies in various formats and conditions. It wasn’t until the Spring semester that I really learned the core principles of archival practices, and have only begun to truly process and organize my other family photographs.

I digitized some albums and I experimented with various visualization and online exhibition tools and learned about the importance of metadata, while testing Dublin Core on an Omeka site.

One challenge of the collection is that I had to carefully disassemble fragile scrapbooks and document each page, preserving the original order and context. All this with the hope of faithfully preserving the visual and textual information of my family’s past. But by digitizing a fragile scrapbook, I could make it accessible, and share it with my extended family online.

The experience processing my father’s collection will lay the groundwork for other collections including my own photographic collection, with the thousands of images shot on 35 mm film, and digital photographs, where my creative life coexists with my family life.

And one day these stories will cross, and the markers in time and place will reveal their similarities and differences.

I was lucky that my father visually documented everything. Without it I wouldn’t be able to tell his story or my own. And I hope I can give that same gift to my kids.

Lots more work to be done, but I’m on the right track.

I am grateful for my time as a TOWER fellow. I accomplished a great deal in three semesters but it is really only the start of my project. There is still much to do, and learn.

I'd like to thank everyone who welcomed me as a TOWER Fellow and provided support or advice. To the recruiters who brought me in, to the people who make the program engaging and stimulating, to my class buddy, Blanca, whose own project provided me with inspiration. And the student interns, congratulations to you too on your graduations. Thank you to all my teachers, and to the team at the digitization lab at the Briscoe Center for American History. Through this experience I have gained an immense amount of respect for the archivists who preserve cultural heritage and history. And to my Tower Fellow friends, it has been a pleasure to get to know you all and learn from each of your stories as well.