USF Black Student Union Digital Collection to Debut

Since its founding in 1968, the USF Black Student Union (BSU) has had an undeniably profound and lasting impact on the University of San Francisco, from building a Black Studies Program from the ground up, pushing for an increase in Black faculty, and recruiting Black students from local high schools to the university, to creating safer spaces and networks of social and educational support for Black students on campus and challenging the university to live up to its stated commitment to Black lives. Despite the BSU’s impact, the student organization has not been a central focus within Gleeson Library Digital Collections, itself largely lacking in Black voices. This is changing.

Once given the go-ahead by library administration (thank you, Shawn Calhoun), I drafted a formal Project Proposal, Project Plan, and Project Workflow document, all of which were approved. I then reached out to University Archivist, Annie Reid, as this digital collection is a collaboration with University Archives, which seeks to house the physical archival BSU materials. I asked Reid for the contact info for original BSU member Adrienne Riley, who donated the first materials digitized for the collection, and she provided Riley’s email address. In an email to Riley, I introduced myself and the digital project. Responding positively, Riley asked that we talk more about it over the phone, which we did. Speaking with Riley, I found her to be warm and extremely supportive, and she was also charmingly self-effacing in terms of the tremendous role she played in helping lay the foundation for the BSU. At the close of our phone conversation, Riley said she would reach out to other early members of the organization, informing them of the project and encouraging them to contact me. Which she did. And they did.

In Spring 2021, I spoke by phone with several BSU members from the 1960s and 70s, each of whom had contacted me at the request of Riley. With each conversation, which averaged an hour, I gained a deeper understanding of the foundational years of the Black student organization and its history, including accounts of the 1970 BSU occupation and window smashing at the on-campus gym in response to the openly racist actions toward the Black drill team and players during an intramural basketball game; campus guests invited by the BSU, including Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, Dick Gregory, Eldridge Cleaver, and Curtis Mayfield; Black Cultural Week 1969 that included a fashion show, live music, and a “demonstration in memory of Brother Malcolm X”; and recollections of the campus atmosphere at that time that brought previously isolated Black students together to form a supportive community that wanted to see each other succeed. These accounts are proving useful in shaping the digital collection, and it is hoped that in the future they will be collected as oral histories for the digital collection.

Over the summer, I met with Scholarly Communications Librarian Charlotte Roh regarding access to the BSU digital content in the institutional repository — PDFs that I have since downloaded and edited for upload to the new digital collection. I also worked with Roh in how this content will be linked at the item level from the digital collection to its original location in the Scholarship Repository, as well as formulation of a rights statement emphasizing open access to items in the digital collection. I also connected with Head of Metadata and Collection Management Gina Solares about the creation of metadata, including schemas and terminology, for each of the PDFs to be uploaded to the collection. This metadata conversation between the two Ginas at Gleeson, Solares and me, has been ongoing, due to the importance of finalizing access points, controlled vocabularies, and workflow for metadata creation for this project and future digital collections. And the collaboration with University Archives continues. Currently, University Archivist Annie Reid is working on a Deed of Gift for the materials that Adrienne Riley donated, and the language of this document will inform the formulation of a rights statement for this new digital collection.

Right now, the USF Black Student Union Collection digital collection exists, though it’s not yet visible to the public. Over the summer, I created the collection with OCLC’s digital asset management application, CONTENTdm, which Gleeson uses to host its digital collections. In creating the digital collection, I configured the website, including its field properties for the metadata and its landing (introductory) pages, for which I wrote the header and paragraph copy. All that awaits now is the upload of content, which will happen once the metadata (including the rights statement) for the PDFs is completed. The goal, as decided by me and the University Archivist, is to have the digital collection be public-facing in the Fall 2021 semester. All of the digital collection’s content will not be uploaded for its debut, as the collection will continuously be added to, thanks to the generous amount of archival material donated by Adrienne Riley, the abundance of BSU-related content to be culled from the USF Yearbooks Collection and The Foghorn – USF Student Newspaper Collection digital collections within Gleeson Library Digital Collections, and newer materials from recent and current BSU members, whom I and Reid have been reaching out to.

The USF Black Student Union Collection has been a long time coming. It’s been a collaborative process of two years and counting. That this digital collection will soon be seen by BSU membership past and present, by the USF campus community, historians and researchers, and the general public, will be hugely rewarding. Furthermore, it will serve as freely available educational resource that is in perfect alignment with Gleeson Library’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion; its antiracism work; and its support of Black Lives Matter. The USF Black Student Union Collection digital collection is coming, and it will be live. Be ready!