Does your institution have a collection of oral histories you would love to bring to life? Is your institution in a neighborhood that has changed significantly? Do you want to bring that old neighborhood back to life? Are you looking to connect stories to objects in your collection?
If you answer yes to any of these questions then the C2C webinar, Preserving Our Past As Place-Based Care Work is a great place to start. In it, Rita Cofield encourages us to stop thinking of preservation as a practice that freezes things in time and start thinking about it as managing change to help protect places that have stories to tell. Deqah Hussein-Wetzel explains that doing care work is caring for the people who are telling the stories and preserving the physical places they are talking about. Their insights give us plenty of food for thought about how we can use stories to bring things to life. They also provide resources to help us in the process.
The C2C Care webinar archives has other webinars that could help you along the way as you work to tell stories and preserve the media on which they are recorded.
· Oral History in the Digital Age
· Caring for Audiovisual Material
· Using Social Media to Tell Your Collections' Stories
· Telling the Story of Your Collections to the Press
We also have webinars that may help you think differently about the stories you want to tell and preserve.
· Decolonizing in Collections Care
· Whose Heritage? Objects, Politics and Collections Care
· Collections Care and Social Justice
Connecting to Collections Care is a valuable resource with a breadth of archived webinars on important topics related to collections care, and also a very active community monitored by conservators for all of your collection care questions. Check us out if you haven't already!
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Joelle Wickens
Assistant Professor of Preventive Conservation
University of Delaware Art Conservation Department
Newark DE
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