What is a historian to do when their topic of study has been neglected by the existing archives, or even worse, the existing archive was destroyed? One option is to create your own archive. This roundtable panel brings together historians, archivists, and culture bearers from New Orleans and Louisiana who have faced these issues and have solved them in different ways.

This session includes four individuals with experience building an archive from scratch. Panelists will contribute information about finding (and evolving) an archive’s purpose, securing funding, structures of community engagement, and project management both within the project team and with external university (or institutional) partners. The session will also look at what it means to build an archive in the absence of a traditional archival space as digital technologies allow for more democratic means of information gathering and sharing. Finally, the panelists will speak to what it means to work through an “archival diaspora”, locating information about their topics held in other places, to digitally repatriate the knowledge of them, and to make them accessible to wider audiences.

Rachel Lyons, the Archive & Cultural Heritage Director for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation for more than 25 years, will discuss the challenges and successes of organizing and making accessible to the public over 55 years of Jazz Fest history. Starting with a few boxes of material in an empty room, Rachel has built the Jazz & Heritage Archive into a robust collection with a wonderful online presence, detailing not only the musical performances of the festival, but also the artistic and cultural legacy and endeavors of the Foundation more broadly.

Historians Brian McGowan and Edward Holt have created the Voices of Grambling project, an institutional history of Grambling State University launched after the tragic loss of Grambling’s library to a flood in 2015. They will discuss reconstructing lost knowledge, detail their work with the local Grambling community and other outside stakeholders, and provide an overview of their successes in securing project funding.

Frank Perez is Executive Director of the LGBT+Archives Project of Louisiana. Seeing a dearth of LGBT+ materials in existing New Orleans archives, the group’s founders began by educating the community on the importance of archiving LGBT+ historical materials and making them available for access, research, and study. With strategic fundraising, the group aims to assist in the preservation and accessibility of LGBT+ collections, helps promote the proper maintenance and preservation of historical LGBT+ materials and then index, publish, and maintain a list of these materials and where they are located.

Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes is Big Chief of the Northside Skull and Bones gang, an Afro-Creole/ African American Carnival organization, with roots going back over 200 years. Bruce will discuss the challenges of recording and preserving their history and shaping it into an archive, both physical and digital, that will preserve their cultural traditions and introduce the wider public to this unique New Orleans institution.