Archives and Special Collections

Greetings!

My name is Kathryn Gstalder, and I’ve spent the 2020-2021 academic year as an archives intern with Archivist Sarah Oswald at the Biddle Law Library. My work has been focused on providing greater searchability of, and access to, the National Bankruptcy Archives (NBA) Oral History Collection.

As a brief introduction, here a few things about me:

• I grew up in Toledo, a city in Northwest Ohio known as the Glass City.
• In December of 2020, I finished my MLIS program which I completed through the iSchool at Wayne State University.
• I worked at my school’s student bookstore throughout my undergraduate education at Ohio State University.
• A book which I’ve recently enjoyed reading is Glittering Images, an art history book written by Camille Paglia.

While working with the NBA Oral History Collection, I have had the opportunity to contribute to several areas of the collection’s archival processes. My first assignment was to research metadata templates for oral history collections, and to come up with a metadata template for the NBA oral histories.

Using Box, Sarah and I organized our shared files in three areas—master files, project files, and access files. I came up with file naming schemes both for our master object files and for our access metadata files. Sarah uploaded master videos and audio clips to Box from YouTube. Finalized transcripts were also housed in the master files folder.

Below is an image from the NBA oral history interview with Norma Hamnes and Ike Shulman, co-founders of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACBA).

Once the interviews were in Box, I screened them in order to understand their contents so that I could write useful metadata description. Once the metadata was filled into an excel spreadsheet and saved as a tab-delimited text file, it was added to our access metadata files in Box. Here are some of the metadata elements created for the NBA oral history interview with Judge Judith Jones:

Before ingesting the master object files and access metadata to CONTENTdm, I checked to make sure we had the interviewee’s signed release form on file. When all the above had been completed, we ingested the items into the CONTENTdm Project Client and then Sarah approved the items for upload to the server. Then the interviews became widely accessible online through the library’s Digital Collections.

We kept track of individual interviews’ workflow progress through a spreadsheet on Box, located in our project files folder.

I also created a poster presentation for the Spring 2021 Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference about how working remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic impacted the way in which we worked on this collection. Here is a link to a YouTube playlist containing that presentation and others from the conference: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7gSvOZUOKE4zkd6OUBGVcSI_sYfFMkhL

I’ve really enjoyed diving into these oral histories and learning about the individuals involved in the field of bankruptcy law. Moving forward I will be working on creating a manual for the oral history collection, as well as continuing to add incoming oral history interviews to the library’s Digital Collection.