NFBCO Celebrates the Completion of its PHD Project

by Peggy Chong

From the Editor: Peggy Chong is often called the Blind History Lady and for good reason. She is obsessed with writing down the history of blind people that, if not captured soon, will go away. She mourns what has been lost and is looking for people to join with her so that what happens today and in the future doesn’t become lost to history. Here is what she has to say about a recent event in Colorado:

On Friday, October 14, 2022, many gathered at the Colorado Center for the Blind in Littleton, Colorado, to meet in person the ladies behind the keyboards for the NFBCO’s Preservation of Historical Documents (PHD) project.

Julie Hunter, long-time member of the NFB of Colorado worked diligently to preserve the old records discovered after a water leak a few years back. In 2018 she told me about the old records they found, dating back to 1915. We looked through them together and marveled at what there was and what was missing. The two of us visited with archivists and librarians to learn the best place to start. For months the two of us sorted and resorted the old files, minutes, letters, news articles, and more.

Early in 2019 I began reaching out to volunteer groups to talk about the PHD project, raise funds for it, and find volunteers who could transcribe the scanned files that were still unreadable. Few understood the importance of the project or our need for volunteers.

By the end of February, 2020, Julie and I were ready to send the boxes of sorted records to DocuTek, a professional document scanning service. Then COVID shut everything down. For a few months nothing happened. As businesses began to reopen, DocuTek picked up our files, and in about a month, we had a flash drive with great PDF and OCR’d files, most of them unreadable by the blind.

We began reaching out to the organizations and contacts from the previous year. Some showed more interest in volunteering if they could do it from home. Other organizations had shut down. Slowly, we recruited one volunteer, then another.

Not all volunteers were able to complete an assignment. We wanted the material to reflect the original file, including any misspellings. However, that did not mean that we could make spelling or formatting errors ourselves. If a volunteer was not able to complete a file with only one or two mistakes, the volunteer was replaced.

By the fall of 2021, we were the project to volunteer for. More than one hundred volunteers spent several thousand hours transcribing our old records and other material discovered during the past two years. By March of 2022, the last file was returned.

The next step was to find a librarian who could help us put the material in a format that would be pleasing to libraries where we could give our electronic files as part of their collection. We sent out emails, letters, and made phone calls to potential librarians beginning in the fall of 2021. Not until May of 2022 were we able to find a professor and her students willing to take on the project.

Not being librarians ourselves, Julie and I expressed our desire about the way our blind history of Colorado should be preserved. When we met with the interested professor in May of 2022, she talked with us about a new platform where small collections such as ours were being housed in a “virtual” library. She explained that we would have control over our content and that the history of the blind of Colorado would be free and available to anyone who used the virtual library from anywhere in the world. This sounded perfect. Ashley Love, the student now graduated, is still in the process of uploading our files to the Colorado Virtual Library. Researchers are now able to learn the history of the blind movement in Colorado from the blind themselves.

A book of about eighty pages in length was prepared as a final document for the project. The book demonstrates the significance and potential of our archives. Several sets of minutes, at least one from each decade, included in the book highlight some of the projects and legislation worked on by the blind since 1915. Sixteen short biographies of the leaders of the blind movement in Colorado along with photographs highlight the successes of the blind in Colorado as individuals and as a part of creating a better life for those yet to come.

That brings us to October 14, 2022, at the Colorado Center for the Blind. The NFBCO hosted a celebration to mark the completion of the PHD project as outlined back in January of 2019. We invited all the volunteers, funders, friends, and Federationists to help us celebrate.

A display of some of the old records volunteers only saw in a PDF was there to peruse. Most documents are not in a condition to be handled often so remained in the basement. Plaques dating back to the 1930s as well as writing guides and slates and styluses were also on display.

State Representative David Ortiz, himself disabled, spoke to the assembled about the importance of knowing our history as disabled people. He told us that until he saw for himself another disabled person elected to public office, he did not think a disabled person had ever or could ever be an elected leader. Now, Representative Ortiz encourages all disabled individuals to get involved, be a part of the political process, and run for public office. He was impressed with the accomplishments of the blind of Colorado listed in the souvenir book he was given.

Awards were presented. Nikki Tennant, one of the first volunteers, completed her first file in August of 2020 and she completed her last file in February of 2022. She was the longest serving PHD volunteer.

An award was presented to FirstBank for providing thirty-nine volunteers for the project. FirstBank has a program for employees to give back to the community through volunteering. Each employee is rewarded for completing sixteen hours of voluntarism each year. Some did their sixteen hours and left, while others completed many more hours of transcribing. Debora McCurdy accepted the plaque on behalf of FirstBank.

Nichole Chrissis, Archivist for the tenBroek Library, accepted a flash drive with all the files in our NFBCO history collection. The thumb drive included more files than will be available through the Colorado Virtual Library such as audio interviews, additional legal cases, very old news clippings about blindness in general, and other blindness-related material based in Colorado, but not part of our original archives.

Please check out our history at https://nfbco.cvlcollections.org/. Share our link with blind students, schools for the blind, and NFB leaders. Our history makes great discussion topics for chapter meetings and seminars.