The Barbados Ephemera Project: A Look Back at MEAP’s First Published Collection

When reflecting back on this project, what is a particularly proud moment for you and your team?

“I cannot single out one particular moment, but reflecting back on the project, I can see a series of proud moments as we were trying to complete the project during the COVID pandemic! We had to adapt to new and quite restrictive regulations. For several weeks from May and over the summer, only one person at any point was allowed to work in the digitization room. In retrospect, coordinating among project members, keeping track of the scanning process, metadata creation, post-processing of images, and the circulation of the physical items to be digitized, as well as meeting grant reporting requirements provided us with lots of moments to be proud of.”

What is one of your favorite aspects about this collection overall? Any personal favorite items in particular?

“I loved working with this collection, because it reflects social aspects of life on the island as it happened. Education, religion, entertainment,... economy, are all represented among items in the collection…Unlike other projects, where we digitized historic textual material, the materials of this project, being ephemera, are vivid and colorful, visually appealing and engaging.

I think that my favorite group of materials are funerary booklets. They provide biographical information about the deceased, often accompanied by their pictures, and convey emotion. This group of materials can be an excellent tool for genealogists.

I also like that the collection highlights Barbados’ culture, reflecting the transition from colonial life to national consciousness. This is seen in the archive’s booklets of theatrical performances, art, music, dance, and festivals celebrating the country’s creativity.”

In a recent twitter thread, you discuss the possibilities, but also the limitations of digital archives. How does that idea relate to this project specifically?

“As [in] all archival collections, users start out with materials that have been preserved in the [physical] archives. Materials in the ephemera collection reflect the collecting priorities and values of the archivists who collected them. Thus, even at the start of digitization, physical collections present various degrees of biases. The Barbados Ephemera collection is no different in this respect.

…Thankfully, during this project, we were able to digitize the full series of the ephemera—at least what was there…. Silences in the physical collection have been reified in the digitized Barbados Ephemera Collection, and are perpetuated. Users who might be lured by the promises of ‘totality’ of what exists online, [might also] think that these materials are a mirror copy of life in Barbados during the second half of the twentieth century…Selecting this series of material for digitization means that other complimentary materials have not been digitized. Newspapers, periodicals, address books, yearly albums are some other materials that have not yet been digitized.”

What does this kind of archival gap mean for research and researchers?

“Ultimately, understanding what materials we start our research with and the skewed nature of online collections has far-reaching implications, as increasingly researchers engage with machine-learning approaches without accounting for the biases and dangers already existing in the data.

Keeping in mind all these limitations, I see the Barbados Ephemera collection as a starting point of further inquiry and contextualization. Rather than using it simply for its informational content, users can engage with the material in a dialectic and generative way to understand the processes and actors involved in their creation, preservation, and eventual digitization."

Can you reflect on the possibilities of digitization? What are some other limitations that can help us understand the complexity of creating and publishing openly accessible digital collections?

“Most digitization projects… that host digitized materials in institutions in the ‘global north’ end up serving global north audiences. Local audiences in originating countries remain largely unaware of their own digitized collections, mainly because they are unfamiliar with large aggregators of materials, as well as for other issues that often have to do with internet availability, bandwidth, and digital literacy.

Due to the [COVID-19] pandemic, we did not have the chance to organize workshops to engage the local public with the digital collection. Organizing workshops to engage with a digitized collection might sound an oxymoron: after all, digitization is seen as a democratization process and as promoting the accessibility and visibility of materials. My experience has shown that alongside digitization, it is imperative that events and workshops targeting local audiences are scheduled. Such workshops can serve to celebrate digitization projects, introduce digitized materials and interfaces to people, as well as allow the audience to engage freely with material and offer often unexpected vantage points to material.”

Finally, what are your hopes for the future of this collection as well as its impact on users and the local community?

“This is a collection that has great potential particularly for those who research Barbados’ history…. Its impact, though, is not simply at the national level. In addition to Barbados, it reflects life, history, and culture of the wider Caribbean. Because of the nature of materials, it also provides a good understanding of the transition of Barbados from a colonial territory to an independent nation.

This collection is useful for university students who conduct projects on Caribbean Studies, genealogical researchers, scholars [of] many different disciplines (e.g. historians, economists, social scientists, and artists), and also for the wider public.”