Students will attend a series of lectures delivered by experts in the field and gain hands-on experience in cloud-based cataloging, handling, and preservation of born-digital oral history collections to be described in Stanford University Libraries’ Digital Repository for broad dissemination. Specifically, students will be handling digital oral history artifacts alongside professional archivists as they arrive at The 1947 Partition Archive. Students will also learn to identify nuances and evaluate ethical considerations when curating digital oral history artifacts for dissemination on popular social media platforms for the public. Lectures will include topics on the history of techniques used by humans to preserve history, on the library and information sciences field, on oral history in the digital age, ethical handling of sensitive collections, and geo-tagging in politically evolving regions, among others. Students emerging from the program will have a solid practical basis from which to explore more advanced topics within the library and information science fields as well as the humanities in general.

This is a remote, part-time fellowship that will unfold alongside the student’s regular college work, although students will be required to attend a mandatory orientation in Berkeley, California at The 1947 Partition Archive’s headquarters. The orientation will include field trips to the University of California at Berkeley’s South and South-East Asia libraries, as well as the Stanford University Libraries. Fellows will receive a laptop (to be returned at the end of the fellowship) as well as a monthly stipend.