By Mike Templeton

The Urban Appalachian Community Coalition has a long-standing relationship with The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County (CHPL) as one of our most important community partners. The Public Library has been a stalwart supporter of urban Appalachian culture, history, and intellectual engagement in the lectures, exhibits, and teaching programs. We are proud to have partnered with CHPL yet again for the digitization and wider availability of UACC’s Kith and Kin collections. Both Perceptions of Home and the Urban Appalachian Story Gathering Project are included as part of the Oral History section of CHPL’s digital library, and can be accessed here by scrolling down and clicking on the link which says Urban Appalachian Community Coalition.

All photographs, text and audio included as part of the physical Perceptions of Homeexhibit are now available in the digital library, as is the audio transcript and exhibit booklet. As many of you know, Perceptions of Home was created in 1996 as a traveling exhibit that presents the “story of the migration of a people and a culture as told through the stories of twenty-two families and individuals who, through choice or circumstances, made the urban environment of greater Cincinnati their home away from home.” The exhibit includes photographs by Appalachian photographer Malcolm Wilson and interviews conducted by Appalachian writer Don Corathers. UACC’s more recent Story Gathering Project videos and transcripts are also being added to the digital library, with individual pages focusing on each of the 45 interviews. As the interviews from our new audio Story Gathering Project in collaboration with A Picture’s Worth are processed, they too will be added to the Oral History section of CHPL’s digital library, along with the photographs chosen by the interviewees to represent family. This ongoing aspect of Kth and Kin is funded in part by the Ohio Humanities Council. All of this is great news for urban Appalachians, historians, and anyone with an interest in the history of greater Cincinnati.

I spoke with the Community Content Creator for CHPL, Clarity Amrein, to get a sense of how Kith and Kin fits into the library collections and how her work helps optimize these kinds of resources. Amrein explained that her position is really a hybrid one “that is part local history reference librarian, part oral historian, and part digitization coordinator.” This kind of multi-modal position obviously demands a wide breadth of knowledge and capabilities which makes it possible to not only direct library patrons to the digital collections, but also how best to use them for their purposes. Kith and Kin is a combination of things: part photographic exhibit and part oral history. This is where Clarity Amrein’s insights become so important: “My job is focused around CHPL’s new oral history center, the Cincinnati Story Center. I help to collect oral histories, artifacts for digitization, and gather content to create and curate digital exhibits, such as the one for UACC.” As library users make their way through the digital collections on the library website, Amrein’s work is to facilitate the use of this collection to help people get the most out of all that is available.

The digital collections in the Cincinnati Public Library are magnificent resources. On the CHPL website, under Books and Media, you can scroll down to the digital library link. This will take you directly to the entire digital collection section. Here you can scroll through and research things like collections of newspapers from Cincinnati history. This collection contains things that could appeal to almost anyone no matter their specific interests in Cincinnati history. For instance, the collection of contains resources such as “Genealogy & Local History,” “Cincinnati Brewing History,” and “Samuel Hannaford Architectural Drawings” for those who love to explore the architectural history of the city. Urban Appalachians now take a prominent place in this collection with Kith and Kin’s Perceptions of Home and Urban Appalachian Story Gathering Project, and it all can be found in the digital collections under “Oral Histories.” Ours is a history that runs through everything that makes Cincinnati, and the Kith and Kin collections now offer a detailed look at some of the faces and stories that make up that history.

Much of the initial work has been to digitize the photographs in Perceptions of Home. Clarity Amrein told me that Perceptions offers an enormous window into urban Appalachian life and history in Cincinnati. “UACC lent us about 120+ poster-sized exhibit panels and an accompanying booklet, which were digitized at the Downtown Main Library in our digitization lab on the second floor,” Amrein explains. The process is done in the library’s “digitation lab” which has “multiple industrial scanners of varying sizes and capacities and a team of specialized staff that digitizes all of our internal and external materials.” The entire exhibit is now available in high-resolution. While this is clearly a treasure for urban Appalachians, the collection is also a gift to anyone and everyone with an interest in urban Appalachian life and culture, Appalachia in general, or the history of Cincinnati. It is just as important to emphasize that Malcolm Wilson’s photography in this collection stands as one of the finest artistic testimonials of Appalachian life.

Currently the majority of the Story Gathering videos and accompanying transcripts from Urban Appalachian Community Coalition’s Kith and Kin program have been added to CHPL’s digital library, with more to come. As both Perceptions of Home and Story Gathering are now bundled together with Kith and Kin, they are natural complements and need to occupy the same space in research archives. Clarity Amrein said CHPL will be archiving aspects of the Kith and Kin project as it grows, and any other materials UACC might be interested in having archived. Kith and Kin material will also become part of a curated digital exhibit on the Library’s website. That is not available yet, but will be before the end of the year. There is much to look forward to as the urban Appalachian segments of the CHPL digital collections continues to grow.

CHPL’s archival work and the Ohio Humanities Council funding is allowing UACC to create its own Kith and Kin website. Right now, the site is somewhat bare bones, but does include the Perceptions of Home exhibit booklet and links to the Story Gathering Project videos. We are in the process of creating a digital Perceptions of Home exhibit that mimics the physical exhibit using the digitized images provided by the Library. We will also create a Story Gathering exhibit with a similar look which links each story to the corresponding page in CHPL’s digital library, thus giving access to the video and transcript for each person interviewed. We project unveiling all this at the end of the year as well.

The partnership between the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition and the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County is among the most important and long-standing with our community partners. We are tremendously grateful for the support our library has offered to UACC and all urban Appalachians. Our public library is among the jewels of Cincinnati life and culture. With the digitized version of the Kith and Kin collections, the oral histories of urban Appalachians are widely available for the years to come. These are magnificent resources for all of us urban Appalachian and for all the communities that make up our city and beyond.

Michael Templeton is a writer, and independent scholar. He is the author of The Chief of Birds: A Memoir published with Erratum Press and Impossible to Believe, forthcoming from Iff Books. He is also the author of Collected Apoems, forthcoming from LJMcD Communications and the awaiting of awaiting: a novella, with Nut Hole Publishing. Check out his profile in UACC’s Cultural Directory. He has published numerous articles and essays on contemporary culture and works of creative non-fiction as well as experimental works and poetry. He lives in West Milton, Ohio with his wife who is an artist.