IASA 2018 Annual Conference

In 1955, the National Farmers Organisation (NFO) formed a small activist group in the U.S. midwest to remedy the rapidly decreasing prices of diverse agricultural products. This grassroots organisation soon became a national political movement, with membership surging to tens of thousands of farmers across 35 states. The NFO-led protests of the 1960s were rooted in the radical ideas of the broader historical period. Many outside of the NFO saw withholding actions, boycotts, and the push for collective bargaining as revolutionary and controversial. The NFO established the Public Information Department to support the large national scope of the organization. This unit developed TV and radio programs that were distributed to members and broadcast stations across the country. The NFO recordings not only document the growth of the NFO movement, but also provide insight into how the organisation built a following of independent farmers with the use of audiovisual media as a "social media" in a way that was relatively new. This collection offers a window into technology adoption by social and political movements.

This talk will be about digitization of the NFO film collection, funded by a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Recordings at Risk program. I will present an informal guide – aimed at smaller institutions – on managing workflows, including: identifying a fund-able collection, what to expect from your vendor, how to work with other departmental teams, and how ensure your collection’s accessibility. For this project, one of our biggest challenges was developing workflows to create closed captioning (CC) in-house. I will be sharing our student-friendly, DIY process for providing CC for AV records, which ensures accessibility compliance and allows search engines to index transcripts, increasing online record visibility.