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A pair of state grants will enable Syracuse University professors and staff to digitize valuable records pertaining to Oakwood Cemetery and Syracuse’s Latino community. 

The grants, awarded by the Central New York Libraries Resource Council, will support two projects: converting decades-old death and burial records for Oakwood Cemetery into a searchable database and expanding digital access to cultural artifacts in the La Casita Cultural Center’s archives. 

Déirdre Joyce, head of the digital library program at Bird Library, said the grants are relatively small but will help fund digitization efforts that SU Libraries doesn’t immediately have the capacity to support. 

“It was a good way to facilitate what they needed without having the internal resources to do it,” Joyce said. “That investment is what helps ensure these materials are maintained in the long-term.”

The Oakwood Cemetery project, which received $5,000 in grant funding, will convert handwritten notes in books from the cemetery into a digital format. The project will consist of two phases, according to Meg Craig, an adjunct professor of magazine, news and digital journalism and one of the project’s leads.

The first phase, which involves scanning the pages into virtual documents, will be the responsibility of the resource council and will only take a few months. The second and more time-consuming phase will require student interns to translate the records on the scanned pages into a searchable database. The grant will cover their wages. 

“(These records) have sort of just been mouldering in the storage room for who knows how long, probably since they were written,” Craig said. 

Journalism professor Jodi Upton, who spearheaded the project, is looking to get the data out into the world, Craig said. 

The information in the Oakwood Cemetery records won’t just be valuable to central New York residents searching for long-lost ancestors, Craig said. It will also help researchers in a variety of fields, like sociology and epidemiology, who may seek to identify trends in how and why people in the past died. The data could point to patterns of disease or malnutrition that may unravel mysteries for current or future academics.

Understanding how people died can shine a light on the time period they lived in, she said. This project will preserve that knowledge before the aging materials deteriorate beyond use.

“These books are kind of literally falling apart. They’re extremely old, going back 150 years or more,” Craig said. “It’s still data — just data the way it used to be, which is written into a physical book.”

La Casita Cultural Center also received $1,000 in grant funding from the resource council. It will use the grant to make its Cultural Memory Archive accessible and searchable online through the New York Heritage Digital Collection and SU Libraries. 

The Cultural Memory Archives contains hundreds of pieces of art and research done by, or that are relevant to, Syracuse’s Latino community or Latino students at SU. 

“The Cultural Memory Archive project at La Casita has the potential to grow and contribute immensely to the much-needed documentation of historical and cultural records representing Latinx/Hispanic communities in Central and Upstate NY,” said Teresita Paniagua, executive director of La Casita, in an email.

La Casita’s digital collections have been stored on an SU server with access restricted to La Casita staff until now, said Dragana Drobnjak, La Casita’s librarian and archivist. The items in the collection are gifted to the cultural center or are given on a loan basis, she said. 

The resource council grant will allow La Casita to make the items in its collection accessible and searchable for researchers beyond SU. 

“This process is extremely important because portals like New York Heritage do not contain collections specific to Latinx communities,” said Drobnjak. “It is important to include these pieces and these items in the collective memory of our society.”

The grants come as SU Libraries faces its own battle to preserve rare materials in its Special Collections Research Center. Valuable materials in the special collections — including historical photos and pieces of writing worth millions of dollars — have been decaying while SU has stalled construction of a facility that could save them. University officials have announced plans to install a climate-controlled storage unit to hold the materials until a final preservation facility can be built.

Digitization of artifacts plays a key role in SU’s preservation efforts, since creating digital copies of valuable materials means the original versions will be handled less by researchers, Joyce said.

“These grants were really about digitization for access,” Joyce said. “But digitization for preservation, that’s really the business that we’re in.”

Published on May 5, 2021 at 10:23 pm

Contact Chris: cjhippen@syr.edu