Education, GIS Mapping and Portals of Knowledge: Archival Strategies and Perspectives from ONE Archives

Education, GIS Mapping and Portals of Knowledge: Archival Strategies and Perspectives from ONE Archives

Following recent occurrences in world politics, archiving queer content has become fraught with concerns. Just when the future of the queer past was looking more bright, agencies that provide grants for processing, Internet freedoms, and greater political protections have altered their foci creating challenges. This presentation speaks of efforts by ONE Archives at the University of Southern California to create a global GIS Mapping Project, an International Internet Portal, educational resources for teachers of LGBTQ history and other strategies to protect and disseminate queer content to communities in need in a time of strife. Over the past years ONE created Queer Terrains, a GIS mapping project whose goal is to populate spaces and historical times that suffered erasure of queer presences. Queer Terrains also provides alternative points of entry into archives around the world. Now there are over fifteen hundred pins on the site, more than thirty on a Tokyo site and plans to extend that terrain to a global context with the cooperation of individuals and institutions worldwide, as the participants in this panel show. ONE does not seek to own this platform but become a content aggregator. The international Internet portal is a joint project with a major national archive to produce a portal into archival content, for smaller archives, which have limited resources for an online presence, to increase visibility and accessibility. ONE’s educational panel project has already produced a series of panels on LGBTQ American History, AIDS History and Legendary Lesbians, that are currently on loan to affinity groups at corporations, in high schools and through resource aggregators for LGBTQ education. Continuing to protect the future of the queer past will take new strategies and greater cooperation in this new world order, using PowerPoint slides and content from the archive itself this presentation seeks to share possible strategies for the future.