Poster

Preserving LGBTQ+ Stories: Recent Changes to the UW-Madison LGBTQ+ Oral History Program

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Abstract

In our current era, where harm against LGBTQ+ communities is on the rise, the need to record and preserve LGBTQ+ histories and stories is tantamount. The University of Wisconsin-Madison LGBTQ+ Oral History Program works directly in this goal to preserve Wisconsin LGBTQ+ history, and recent changes to the program have been made to broaden the scope and impact of the program. These include reorganizing the LGBTQ+ inventory to make it more accessible for researchers, working closely with different university committees to advocate for the program, instituting community-based outreach to identify new narrators, and, most recently, introducing a narrator compensation policy that allows the program to compensate narrators for the gift of their time. This poster will highlight these changes and include recommendations for how other oral history/archival programs can implement similar ones; additionally, the poster will include accessible visuals and handouts that will offer concrete ways for oral history professionals/archivists to advocate for their programs at the institutional level. Moreover, introducing these changes demonstrates the program’s commitment to new conversations in the field of community archives that simultaneously devolve institutional power and uplift narrators as they share their stories with us. In doing so, these programmatic changes are integral to sowing institutional change that ultimately protects and preserves LGBTQ+ lives, histories, and stories in the archive.

How to Cite:

Advent, M. D., (2024) “Preserving LGBTQ+ Stories: Recent Changes to the UW-Madison LGBTQ+ Oral History Program”, MAC Annual Meeting Presentations 2024(1).