A Digital-First Approach for Kerby Miller Collection
In January 2021 Kerby Miller (Professor Emeritus of History for the University of Missouri) donated his vast research collection about Irish immigration to North America and Irish diaspora identities to the University of Galway. Miller’s collection ranges across multiple material types including (but not limited to) letter transcripts, original letters, photocopies of original letters, memoirs, autobiographies, research notes, research correspondence and genealogical records. After decades of close reading for his own academic research, Miller’s choice to donate the materials to the University of Galway has been contingent on the promise that his life's work would be made digitally accessible to academic users and the public alike. A portion of the full collection is due to be released online in early 2024 and this article summarises some of the key stakeholders, methodologies and goals that have guided the project thus far.
Letters Home
The bulk of the collection comprises personal correspondence sent and received across the Atlantic between members of Irish families. Spanning across a period of 250 years, the letters provide intimate reflections on historical subjects, and illuminate a range of perspectives influenced by class, religion, gender and political circumstances.
Miller began collecting and transcribing Irish emigrant correspondence in the 1970s as a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley. At this time, Miller also received a sizeable collection of letters from the historian Arnold Schrier. For five decades, Miller scoured libraries, archives and private collections to expand on this collection. He even placed adverts in Irish newspapers, asking readers to send him any letters they had received from American relatives that they had in their possession. With support from Patricia Mulholland Miller and several graduate research assistants, many of these letters were transcribed over the years before being returned to the senders. In following through on the goal to publish Miller’s collection for access and use by the public, it was decided that the first phase of the digital project would focus on these letters.
In June 2023, Miller visited Galway to deliver an energetic keynote paper for the 9th Society for Irish Latin America Studies (SILAS) Conference hosted by the Moore Institute. He spoke at length about the “the picaresque exploits of James Quinn (alias Tim O’Brien), a young Irish Catholic who in 1920 left his family home in the troubled city of Belfast.” To briefly summarise his louche trajectory:
“...he sojourned in Canada, in South America, in New York and Texas, and finally in Hollywood, California, where he worked as an “extra” in silent films alongside Charlie Chaplin and other cinema legends. Quinn sought fame and fortune in the Amazon jungle and Jazz Age Hollywood, but he had an unfortunate propensity for alcohol and violence, and he sometimes operated outside the law. In 1924, after many dubious adventures, Quinn was arrested in Los Angeles and convicted of burglary, but somehow, he managed to escape to Cuba, where he vanished without a trace.”
The story of Quinn/ O’Brien represents just 1 of 700+ distinct family subseries and only a handful of the 8-10,000 unique letters represented across the collection.
Processing the Collection
Over 2021/ 2022, the collection was reviewed, processed, briefly described to box and series level, and rehoused into 125 archival boxes by Kieran Hoare of the University of Galway Library Archives. In early 2023, the entire collection was digitised by a third-party service provider in a digital-first approach spearheaded by Dr Cillian Joy of the University of Galway Library. A digital-first approach is a methodology that gives preference to releasing content via digital channels over more traditional routes. The more traditional route in this case would be the practice of describing an analogue archives collection (or part thereof) to item level before proceeding to digitisation, and primarily encouraging users to visit the archives reading room to view the physical materials. The decision to digitise first is in line with the library’s commitment to being digital, driving research and opening scholarship. It also aims to speed up the curation, description, ingestion and publication process for an archives collection. More than 150,000 pages were digitised in 10 weeks in hi-resolution .tif format.Marie-Louise Rouget joined the University of Galway Library in April 2023 as Project Digital Archivist for the Kerby Miller collection. She brings a diverse background to the project that spans content, records and digital asset management, copywriting, growth marketing and communications. With this appointment of a project manager, the curation of the digital collection to extract, process and describe letter items is now underway.
One of the primary challenges with curating the collection for publication is the existence of duplicate transcripts that were revised or corrected over the years by the Millers (Kerby and Patricia) and research assistants. A methodology has been proposed internally to identify preferred versions based on accuracy of contents, legibility of text and integrality of the letter item. One of the key considerations is the suitability of the digital files for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scanning to extract key words for search and filtering in the final online platform. The digital project is being closely documented and the lessons learned will be summarised and circulated publicly in due course so that other institutions may also benefit from the outcomes.
Author
Funders and People
Moore Institute for Research in Humanities and Social Studies
Daniel Carey, Director, Moore Institute, University of Galway
Kieran Hoare, Archivist, University of Galway Library Archives
Aisling Keane, Digital Archivist, University of Galway Library Archives
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