$250K grant aims to fill the gaps in Tacoma’s history. Your photos, stories will help
Start gathering your scrapbooks and family stories, Tacoma.
Librarians and scholars have long said that Tacoma’s — and the nation’s — historical archives have blind spots: missing voices or materials, often from historically underrepresented communities.
For years, Tacoma Public Library (TPL) and its staff have worked to fill those gaps.
This month, TPL was awarded funding to back up that effort in the form of a $250,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) — the library system’s largest award to date.
The money will fund a two-year community project, meant to bring the public and local organizations together to broaden representation of Tacoma’s historical archives.
“Our goal with this particular project is to begin to move towards a more inclusive historical record for Tacoma,” said Anna Trammell, who became the Tacoma Public Library’s Northwest Room librarian earlier this year. She was chosen in part because because of her desire to “dig into these omissions and build the community bridges to fill them,” TPL library director Kate Larsen previously told The News Tribune’s Matt Driscoll.
The team behind the project — TPL in partnership with the Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA) at the University of Washington’s Information School — want the new collection to be a product created by the community. Called the Community Archives Center of Tacoma, the public participates in what stories and physical materials will be included.
Starting this fall, people can expect to see opportunities to participate in workshops to better identify the gaps in Tacoma’s history.
“We expect to perform six sessions, engaging 150-200 community members, to identify missing histories that should be included within the archive and community resources for telling those histories,” according to TPL’s project proposal.
In spring 2022, following information collected from the previous community meetings, TPL will begin to collect materials from the public and also help digitize their photographs, scrapbooks, memorabilia, artifacts and other physical materials.
Some of the materials will be audiovisual recordings so that participants to contribute their history in an oral format.
“It’s going to look different because we’re going to be asking the community to contribute their personal papers, their family papers, their stories recorded in their own voices,” Trammell said. “And a lot of the content that’s contributed may be born digital in nature, so website, social media records, things like that that really fill in some of the gaps.”
Trammell said the project also will consider more recent events.
“How have people been responding to some of the upheaval that’s happened in Tacoma just over the last couple of years — thinking about the responses to COVID-19 or the Home in Tacoma project, or the killing the Manny Ellis ... We want to begin to fill in those gaps, but we also want our collection, the library, to be seen as a place that is living and growing and immediately relevant,” Trammell said.
Toward the end of 2022, library leaders plan to create a digital database of the Community Archive Center available to the public.
They also hope it’ll be a model for other cities to do the same. Groups like the Northwest Archivists, the Public Library Association and the Society of American Archivists have already expressed interest and support for the project, Trammell said.
TPL staff applied for the grant earlier this year and was notified of the $247,545 award in August. The IMLS received 172 applications requesting $47.7 million. Of those, 39 projects, including Tacoma Public Library’s, were funded, totaling $12.2 million.
Tacoma’s project has been a long time in the making, said TPL director Kate Larsen.
“We’ve been trying to get this project funded since 2018 and have been on the edge of our seats every time we submit the grant application. I’m thrilled at this truly historic moment for Tacoma Public Library, and for the opportunities this important initiative will bring to our community for years to come,” Larsen said in a statement.
“We hope (to) set a standard nationally for other libraries with local history collections. Investment in collecting genuinely representative histories benefits everyone.”
This story was originally published August 22, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
