Preparing and Sharing Telling Queer History's Audio Archives.

After our last grant report on November 27, 2022, work under the archive project management (APM) portion of TQH's grant contained activities to support the writing, publishing and promotion of the first archive feature. Those activities were research within the archives, drafting, revising, and finalizing the feature. Under the archive media management (AMM) portion of TQH's grant, we published the archive feature on the website and promoted it with Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn social media posts. That work continued through December of 2022.
In January 2023, work under the APM portion of TQH's grant included research within the archives to inform the second archive feature; conceptualization, outlining and drafting the second archive feature story; fact-checking items on the LGBTQ+ history timeline, and a meeting with the timeline team to assess progress.
In February 2023, continued work under the APM portion of TQH's grant included final drafting and revising of the second archive feature (it will be published and promoted in early March); a meeting with the LGBTQ+ timeline team to assess progress and determine next steps; editing the transcripts of archived gatherings (ongoing); assessment of the state of signed consent forms for each archived gathering and preparing for outreach where consent forms were needed; and decision-making about next steps with archived gatherings.

The first article: JOY, RECLAMATION & RESISTANCE received 13 views on our website. The post about it on facebook received 110 views, 8 link clicks, and 20 engagements. Analytics from Meta say the article posted on Dec 8th "This post reached more Accounts Center accounts than 71% of your 50 most recent Instagram posts and stories. This post received more likes, comments and shares than 98% of your 50 most recent Instagram posts and stories."

Rebecca has been contacting storytellers that have yet to sign oral history release forms. We have secured 4 more release forms and paid 4 more storytellers in this first half of the grant period. ; This grant provided financial resources to prepare our audio and video recordings of first person storytelling recordings of our LGBTQ+ gatherings over the last five years, capturing oral history of 61 Minnesotans. Additionally we digitized community-gathered LGBTQ+ history timelines that were on delicate paper timelines. They are now fact-checked and available for public engagement on our website. Overall, we were able to prepare and begin sharing our archives with our community thanks to support from this grant. Our time and resources to do the outreach we had hoped for during this grant round was limited, and we will be seeking funds to continue this work. In our grant application we stated that We will measure our progress by the number of meta-data that we have generated, and the number of stories that we have transcribed, edited, and successfully archived.Creating meta-data with support from the Tretter Collection will be part of phase two of this project, along with more community outreach and marketing. We were able to create 132 unique keywords to begin this process. Two videos composed of clips from our archives have been created and released on our YouTube Channel. We were able to create and publish two written archive features, each containing selections from at least four storytelling events and nearly 10 storytellers to accompany these videos as written archival pieces using source material from storytelling gathering transcripts.
More unedited videos from our recorded events are scheduled to be released via Meta (social media post management platform) over the next two months. The work to create and schedule the posts was done prior to this grant period end, but since the posts will be made public in the weeks and months following this grant report, the results will not be available to include in this report. We would be glad to share those results with you as they become available.
Below are some measurable outcomes of this grant work.
Storytellers paid $100 honorariums = 95
Number of oral history release forms returned = 52
Transcripts created for all 19 available audio/video recordings of storytelling gatherings, and for 4 fundraisers that included storytelling as a program component.
Transcripts that have been fully edited and keyworded- 11
Archive feature articles written and published = 2
Timeline facts checked = MN 79 facts, global 293
Website Timeline views = 152 since June 3rd, 2023.
We had an overall increase in direct views of our website from last year by 100 viewers.
Archives website page views = 55 QR scans to timelines = 15
We created handouts and signage for community engagement events (People's Pride and Roller Derby) to introduce people to our timelines. 15 people scanned them and viewed the LGBTQ+ history information. Scheduled archival sharing: 4 additional speakers (OLH, Pat Nelson, Mason Persons, Coya White Hat-Artichoker). 4 additional events (Queer art, Aging, Housing Justice, Two Spirit). 4 additional audio clips.