Updates from the Museum of Danish America

I hope everyone is having a happy New Year! Last year I spent time speaking to various Lodges and Districts about the DSS Archives Project. I was lucky to be hosted, both digitally and in person, six times last year and I already have two lodge presentations on the books for this year.

You may remember that in 2019 the Museum of Danish America received a grant from the State of Iowa’s Historic Resource Development Program (HRDP). This grant provided 50% of the funding for a two-year project to catalog and organize the Danish Sisterhood of America Archive. Thanks to individual sisters and lodges, we raised all of the matching funds and we successfully completed the project.

What was completed?

Between 2019 and 2021, I re-housed all the documents in the DSS Archive, moving them from regular cardboard boxes to acid-free archival grade boxes and folders. Through this process I organized and catalogued material, both in a physical, finding-aid document and through our digital cataloguing system, PastPerfect. The intent of this project was to make your archive searchable in person and to organize documents so they could easily be found. You are also able to browse the collection of ledgers and documents online, and as long as the material wasn’t sensitive information, I did my best to scan three examples of the contents each folder or ledger.

The grant parameters and the timeframe, however, did not allow for a complete digital scan of any of the materials. This means, if you would like to access them in their entirety, you would still either have to visit on-site or contact me and pay individually for a scan of the material you are wanting to view. I know this is not possible for all of you, and it creates a barrier to access for researchers and those interested in their own family or lodge research.

I want to mention that complete scanning of your collection would be extremely time-consuming and pricy, but the scanning of certain parts of the collection would create greater ac- cess. This is not something we have investigated for any of our other collections to date, but your collection is special and would be of interest in many research areas.

Therefore, I have proposed a second phase to this project, which would encompass the full digitization of the 300 DSS ledgers and the DSS News. These are the two most requested items in the collection so far and contain the most lodge-specific information. These parts of the collection would then be available online for direct viewing by you.

Please look forward to more information about this exciting project coming both from me and a special committee of the Museum of Danish America board, who are also Danish Sisterhood members.

Sincerely,

Cheyenne Jansdatter, MLIS Museum of Danish America Archives Manager & Outreach Associate Member Lodge #102