MDL Staff at the 2017 Oral History Association Annual Meeting

I recently participated in a presentation at the Oral History Association 2017 Annual Meeting, held this year in Minneapolis. This international conference brought together over 460 oral historians and those interested in oral history for three full days of informative sessions, plus workshops and site visits. I facilitated a panel entitled Seeing Immigrants: Using Video to Capture Community Narratives, featuring recent projects undertaken by Saengmany Ratsabout, Acting Director of the Immigration History Research Center (IHRC) and Scott Pollock, Director of Exhibitions, Collections, and Programs at the American Swedish Institute (ASI), engaging with immigrants in our community. Both of their organizations are contributing partners in MDL's Minnesota's Immigrants project. Questions were lively as session attendees wanted to learn more about their contrasting approaches to the same subject, with the IHRC creating tools for immigrants to tell their own stories, which are then published (if they wish) on the Immigrant Stories website, while the ASI focuses on more curated experiences and structured interactions. The session, and the conference overall, was a valuable opportunity to introduce a new audience to the work of the Minnesota Digital Library and our contributors and to learn about what others are doing as well.