Documenting meme culture and preserving ephemera through digital display

ESPN College GameDay came to the James Madison University campus in 2015 and 2017, and functions as a live broadcast, pre-football game event that draws huge crowds. Students bring hand-made signs and posters to the broadcast, and these posters feature prominently in the background of the televised event. When it was announced that the program would come to JMU, Special Collections put out a call on social media to collect student-created GameDay posters, to document the historic athletics event, as well as the student experience around College GameDay. A total of 16 posters were donated, and the collection was formally arranged, described, and digitized for online access in 2022. The poster, and two presenters from JMU, will discuss the unique challenges of documenting and describing meme culture, and how the ephemeral relevancy of memes required item-level description in order to preserve original meaning and intent. Additionally, the poster and presenters will show how the inherent instability of the medium–cardboard, glue, glitter, markers and tape–of handmade posters made digitization for online access a necessity to preserve the look and meaning behind the rapidly deteriorating physical objects. Presenters will also discuss technologies used to support description and access to the collection, including ArchivesSpace and Artstor, and key takeaways learned from the project, from acquisition to online display

Beyond Boxes: Managing Containers and Spaces in ArchivesSpace

With a three-year, $95 million library renovation and expansion set to begin in May 2023 requiring a complete collections move in April 2023, James Madison University Special Collections embarked on a year-long project to establish greater intellectual and physical control of its processed collections as well as unprocessed backlog. Using ArchivesSpace’s container and location management modules, a graduate assistant in consultation with Special Collections staff assigned barcodes to more than 1,800 Top Containers, created and assigned more than 60 Container Profiles, merged Top Containers for boxed-with collections, remediated past local practice of “Locations as Top Containers,” and strategically created and assigned Location Profiles. In addition to the ArchivesSpace work, this project and impending renovation provided staff the space (and incentive) to finally deal with those pesky accessions, legacy collections, and orphaned materials that every repository has in its custody. As a result, staff selectively reappraised accessions; deaccessioned 97 cubic feet of duplicative and non-archival materials comprising trophies and awards, tchotchkes, newspaper clippings, and out of scope records; rehoused unprocessed accessions; and began moving towards an accessioning as processing approach to new acquisitions