As part of a Japanese American Confinement Sites (JACS) grant-funded project supported by the National Park Service, UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library is leading a project to digitize nearly 210,000 pages of War Relocation Authority (WRA) Form 26 individual records of Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII. During the war, the WRA used this two-page census-type document to collect a wide array of sociological, demographic, and biographical data about the incarcerated population. This data was coded to punch cards by the WRA and deposited at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Bancroft Library at the end of the war. The Bancroft Library was involved in transferring the punch card data onto magnetic tape in the 1960s. The resulting data file was used in 1988 to award reparations to Japanese Americans before being transferred to the National Archives, where it is now available online as the Japanese American Internee Data File. The existing data file contains gaps, errors, and inaccuracies, is missing many of the original data fields found in the original forms, and does not represent a comparable level of detail and granularity found in the paper records.

The Bancroft Library is believed to hold the only remaining complete set of over 110,000 Form 26 records, organized by camp, in existence. By leveraging partnerships within and beyond the UC Berkeley community, we are using machine learning to extract data from the digitized forms in order to create a new, more complete and accurate dataset that will serve as a significant resource for survivors and their families, and we are working with community members to determine what constitutes ethical access to these records. In alignment with collections as data principles that encourage computational use of special collections, this project represents a crucial opportunity to explore new methods for enhancing computational access to our vast and growing digital special collections at scale.

This thesis seeks to explore shifting paradigms in digital collections work in the twenty-first century. It puts into conversation different models of digital collection projects, with a particular emphasis on the proliferation of grassroots digital engagement projects and the formation of digital spaces in which community stakeholders (i.e. those “publics” not identified as scholarly or professional experts per se) collaboratively build and interpret collections. U.S. cultural heritage professionals and digital humanists seek to map a future course for digital collections initiatives and to move beyond the techno-optimism that propelled the rapid invention and production of platforms and technical solutions for doing digital cultural heritage work. In the process, we are confronted with “new” issues that are actually not new at all, but rooted in longstanding problems of authority and trust, representation and inclusion. While making significant strides in opening up cultural heritage institutions and processes to a more diverse set of publics, traditional, mainstream cultural heritage institutions are still struggling to significantly address the ways in which digital spaces and digital collections are implicated in considerations of power and identity. We need to seek out new leaders and new models for exploring the humanistic values and possible functions of digital collections in the present if we are to chart a novel course for digital collections and their functions in the twenty-first century.

I suggest that critically-informed, innovative models for digital collections projects at the grassroots level offer cultural heritage practitioners and institutions sustainable and ethical blueprints for the future of digital cultural heritage work. By charting different contemporary models for building and mobilizing digital collections in the public sphere, this thesis aims to contribute to the ongoing conversation about the shifting functions of collecting and interpreting in the digital age.