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Date: 3/1/2021
HOLYOKE – The Holyoke Public Library has found a way to preserve a bit of the city’s history while also sharing it with the community.
Eileen Crosby, archivist of the History Room for the Holyoke Public Library, said the process of digitizing the donation of the collection of Puerto Rican and Latinx VHS tapes began in 2019. The tapes, which were donated to the library after Library Board member Manuel Frau Ramos, who Crosby said built a relationship with Diosdado Lopez of La Familia Hispana Inc., donated the tape collection.
It was after the tapes were donated to the library that the work to archive and digitize them began. She said nowadays, VHS tapes are considered “vulnerable.” She said, “VHS are considered obsolete formatting, they’re really vulnerable. It’s good stuff that’s on these formats that’s really endangered.”
Crosby said she began to explore grants to assist with the cost of the digitization of the collection. It was then that the library was awarded a $14,644 Recordings at Risk grant from the Council of Library and Information Resources (CLIR) which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The digitization project, Crosby explained, was just one of 20 accepted from 77 project applications. The grant is awarded to just two projects a year that focus on preservation, she added.
The requirements for the grant, she said, included having the material be publicly accessible, demonstrating that it had national significance and scholarly interest in the material on the donated tapes. Crosby said this was possible as they had “cultivated connections around Western Mass. and beyond.”
“There’s a lot of interest in Holyoke, student crews who came into the history room until COVID,” she said.
The last and most difficult requirement for the grant was the “technical capacity to actually preserve it.” This, she said, required a collaboration between the library and the local cable access network, Holyoke Media, as the library didn’t have the ability to store the amount of digitized files required to qualify for the grant. “We don’t have the capacity, and that becomes your responsibility not covered by the grant. They’re backing it up to their media, as we make them public they will have access to some of the material,” she said.
Crosby said the tapes were picked up by a company to be digitally converted in May 2019. After that, Crosby convinced intern Ismary Santiago to take on the project in December 2019. She said the library was lucky to have Santiago, who’d spent a significant amount of time watching the videos to know what was on them and editing them while also preserving as much content as possible.
“We were really lucky to get her, she had a full time job when I persuaded her to take this on as a part time job,” Crosby said. She added that the project required a lot of collaboration between herself and Ismary.
“I had to get up to speed on how to set up a spreadsheet and work with Ismary on how to describe the material,” she said, stating that Rodriguez’ “video editing skills, her creative and language skills,” were huge assets to the project. While Rodriguez is not from Holyoke, Crosby said she spent hours viewing the material, which was made up of hours of recordings of a 90s cable access show called “Vecinos/Neighbors” and video recordings taken on a camcorder by Carlos Vega.
“Vecinos/Neighbors,” Crosby explained, aimed to show a different side of Holyoke and the Latino community. “A lot of people around the Valley had negative aspects of Holyoke, they wanted to show more positive aspects, a fuller picture of the Latino community,” she said. Crosby said after the show stopped taping in 1995, Vega began “to travel around the city with a video camera in his trunk,” capturing view of the city.
“Some [videos] were episodes from the show, some were raw footage of activities around the community, painting murals,” Santiago said.
Santiago said when she joined the project had already created a spreadsheet and a general idea of how to describe the content. She said there was no inventory, “all we had to go on was a table on a tape. So we had to watch the videos to make sure it was matching the description.”
She said a lot of the work she did was “translating and deciding this video needs to be split into two without touching it a lot, just separating by topics so it would be easier.” Once the full descriptions of the videos were complete, Santiago said she was then able to upload them slowly to YouTube, where they would begin to be made public over the next several weeks.
Crosby, however, emphasized that while they wanted to describe the material, they also didn’t want to tell the whole story of each video. “We just tried to describe. I really want this to be a collection that we’re not telling the whole story behind the content. That’s going to be for the people who use this,” she said. “We want this to get used by students, by scholars or just the general public.”
She said many of the topics discussed on the taped show are still relevant today, such as bilingual education. Crosby said, “bilingual education, they did away with in this period. Some of this material is really relevant.”
Crosby said she felt as though everything had come “full circle.” She said, “It started out as public access TV, now we’re working with the new public access network.”