Tribal Library Location: Quapaw, Oklahoma
Year Opened: 2008
Service Area Size: 975 patrons/year
Square Footage: 5,000 square feet
Point of Contact: Patricia Billings, library director
Project Description:
The goal of the Quapaw Tribal Library’s digital inclusion lab was to capture and preserve history through the voices of their elders and have the recordings available in the library and online for anyone to access. To achieve this goal, the Quapaw Tribal Library developed a mobile digitization lab to capture and preserve cultural heritage through oral stories recorded at the homes of elders and at group events.
To determine the library’s needs, Patricia Billings, the library director, engaged in a collaborative process of individual interviews and small focus group approaches with library stakeholders. This included a Tribal elders committee, individual elders, a Tribal education committee, and the Tribal information technology department. All stakeholders voiced a need for capturing, preserving, and sharing cultural heritage, while providing ways to share collected oral stories with their community members–most of whom live throughout the United States and away from Tribal lands.
The design of the mobile digitization lab is inspired by a podcast approach with professional-grade equipment for creating high-quality audio, including microphones for recording music and group events. The lab is fully mobile, making it simple and easy for anyone to borrow and take to the home of an elder to collect their oral stories. In addition to the mobile lab, the library also added a production workstation that is capable of audio and video editing with a high-quality monitor, Adobe Suite, and digital storage. To complement the new workstation, the library also upgraded its public access computer lab with new PCs and Apple iMacs. The digital inclusion lab has already brought in former and new patrons into the library who were excited to try out the new computers and recording gear.
Best Practices & Lessons Learned:
- Consider mobile options to increase inclusivity and accessibility: As demonstrated by the Quapaw Tribal Library, if there is not enough space to build a new physical lab, it is still possible to create a mobile lab that will meet your programming goals. A mobile lab provides flexibility to allow patrons to access and use the resource in their own homes. This is especially important for those who may have difficulty visiting their library, whether it’s from physical ailments or a lack of transportation. A mobile option allows digital inclusion efforts to be more inclusive and accessible for community members.
- Collaborate with the communications department to effectively collect and share oral stories: Since the main focus of the digital inclusion lab was to capture the history of the Nation through the voices of elders, it was vital for the library to collaborate with its communications department. The department had made attempts in the past but the efforts were incomplete. Through the mobile lab, it created a unified effort within the Nation to record and share the voices of their elders through social media managed by the Nation’s communications department and through physical copies (CDs/DVDs) managed by the Tribal library.