I created this site as a project for DAR, via my role as a Vivero Digital Scholarship Fellow. The primary goal of the site is to provide an online space where multicultural alumni can engage in community by sharing photos and stories of their time at Grinnell. Secondary goals have been to preserve the histories of student affinity organizations and to build the practice of self-archiving among alumni and current students.
I presented about the archive and my development of the project at the 2022 Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference (BuDSC) in October 2022. It is built in WordPress, hosted through the college's Reclaim Hosting system. The tools I have used to build it out includes WordPress (of course), TimelineJS, Qualtrics, and EPSON Scan technology. Plugins I have used include Folders, Ajax Load More, and Knightlab Timeline JS. Crucial to the project has been the processes of developing a system of categorization, learning to digitize analog materials, identifying a cohesive media storage method, and learning documentation practices.
The idea of a crowdsourced website archive was inspired by a project from the Grinnell College Special Archives: https://crowdsourcing.speccoll.sites.grinnell.edu/
The project lead whose ideas became this website is Sarah Smith-Benanti (DAR). Many thanks to Dr. Liz Rodrigues and Tierney Steelberg for their mentorship, and to Chris Jones, Vrinda Varia, Aziza Mabrey-Wakefield '25, and several alumni and current students for their input and support.
