If you’ve been around The ArQuives lately, you may have spotted Elspeth Brown, Rebecka Sheffield, Nick Matte, Alice Stanton-Hagan or Haley O’Shaughnessy working away in the reading room on the first floor or perhaps tucked away upstairs going through boxes. They’re working on an exciting new initiative that brings together historians, archivists, and community members throughout Canada, the United States and Britain. The project will make some of the wonderful LGBTQ archival materials and oral histories that have been collected and preserved more broadly accessible.
The Collaboratory, as it’s called for shorthand, is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) and involves multiple projects under the leadership of Collaborators Elspeth Brown (University of Toronto), KJ Rawson (College of the Holy Cross), Elise Chenier (Simon Fraser University), Sara Davidmann (University of the Arts London), Aaron Devor (University of Victoria) and Karen Stanworth (York University). The ArQuives is one of several archival partners, which also include the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony, the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria, and the Digital Transgender Archive.
The Collaboratory is the largest oral history project in North America, bringing together 200 interviews and connecting life stories with new methodologies in digital history, collaborative research, and archival practice. The Collaboratory will raise the profile of The ArQuives, support digitization efforts, and make The ArQuives’s trans content more widely accessible in conjunction with the Digital Trans Archives project. For more information, or if you want to get involved, contact Primary Investigator elspeth.brown@utoronto.ca or Project Manager nicholas.matte@utoronto.ca. You can also follow us on facebook, instagram or twitter @lgbtqhistory