Reimagining the Tacoma Community History Project with CollectionBuilder

This case study will explore the Tacoma Community History Project digital exhibit, a project of the University of Washington Tacoma Library. We will discuss our rationale for using static web technology for our digital exhibit, as well as changes we made to the metadata to improve the user experience of the collection. We hope to demonstrate how reimagining the digital exhibit transformed and enhanced the meaning making of our collection. Tacoma is an industrial port city approximately 35 miles south of Seattle on and adjacent to the land of the Puyallup Tribe. The University of Washington Tacoma (UW Tacoma) campus was founded in 1990 in repurposed warehouses in the urban downtown centre. UW Tacoma was founded as an urban-serving university, and continues its mission to serve “place-bound” students in South Puget Sound. The UW Tacoma library, part of the University of Washington Libraries, has a small staff of seven permanent full-time librarians to serve a student body of just under 5,000, as well as five graduate student employees currently enrolled in their Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS). This project began in 1991 with Professor Michael Honey’s “Doing Community History” class. The Tacoma Community History Project attempts to document this "unwritten" history of Tacoma and the South Puget Sound region. The student-created final projects were packaged together and gifted to the library, the majority of which contain cassette tapes or USB thumb drives with audio files, printed essays and transcripts, as well as some accompanying photos. In 2011 there was an effort to digitize the oral histories and make them available via UW’s Digital Collections in CONTENTdm, with 82 now being available digitally. The original CONTENTdm exhibit allows the user to explore the collection by year (the year that the oral history was created), interviewee name, interviewer or student name, and, most prominently, by “communities.” While this was likely created with great intentions, the language used is sometimes problematic or confusing, such as having “Hispanic Americans” and “Mexican Americans” as separate communities. It also equivocates professional communities with cultural communities, placing “civic leaders” alongside “Japanese Americans.” Although oral histories can and do show up in multiple of these communities, the way they are presented here implies that they are distinct–that the Japanese American community in Tacoma is separate from civic leaders. The original exhibit’s design that encouraged users to explore the collection through “communities” did align with the project’s goal to create counter-narratives to the dominant stories of the history of Tacoma, which often focuses on the lumber and railroad industries and European pioneers. This continues to be a positive and productive aspect of the project, with the oral histories regularly being cited by other student projects, Wikipedia, and local historians. However, over the past ten years there has been a growing conversation around gentrification and displacement in Tacoma, which has only amplified since the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2018 the zip code 98402, representing Tacoma’s downtown, part of the Hilltop neighborhood, and the UW Tacoma campus, was one of only two West Coast cities listed in the top 20 gentrifying zip codes (the other was 90014 in downtown Los Angeles) (James). This has continued to be a serious issue, with the Tacoma Housing Authority establishing a program to help combat displacement in the Hilltop neighborhood in 2024 (“Housing Hilltop Community Priority”). With this growing conversation, we hoped to present another way to organize and invite users to explore the collection that situated the oral histories in not only time, but space. Inspired by other mapped oral history projects, particularly the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project out of San Francisco and Our …