Charlotte Nunes
Director of Digital Scholarship Services
Lafayette College
Nora Egloff
Digital Repository Librarian
Lafayette College
Janna Avon
Digital Initiatives Librarian
Lafayette College
Lafayette College Libraries Digital Scholarship Services (DSS) partners on the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium or LVEHC (https://sites.lafayette.edu/lvehc/), a four-year grant initiative supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through June 2021. The goal of the grant is to foster collaboration across campuses, libraries, cultural institutions, and community partners in the Lehigh Valley region of eastern PA, in exploration of themes such as the diversity of communities, the changing nature of work, and the environment and sense of place in the Lehigh Valley during the past half-century. As a partner on the LVEHC, DSS recently launched the LVEHC Digital Archive (https://lvehc-archive.lafayette.edu), a regional digital archive representing diverse collection-building efforts across the Lehigh Valley. Contributors include faculty, students, academic librarians, public librarians, and community partners such as members of the local NAACP. The range of primary source materials collected in the archive includes oral histories, family photographs, historic maps, ephemera, and other materials that document ethnic and immigrant communities, emergent economies in the de-industrial era, relationships between culture and the environment, and other topics. Featuring perspectives from three DSS staff members who have played key roles to actualize the archive, this project briefing will address the challenges and rewards of building a regional, community-driven digital archive hosted by an academic library.