Presidio Research Center Intern Uses Radio Journalism Experience to Increase Public Access to SBTHP’s Oral History Collection

By Jennifer Zwigl

SBTHP Intern, Jenny Zwigl.

Hello! My name is Jennifer Zwigl, and I had the incredible opportunity of interning at the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation’s (SBTHP)
Presidio Research Center in winter and spring of 2024 as I finished up my English degree at UCSB. Getting to work with Dez Alaniz, Director of the Presidio Research Center, has made the last few months of my undergraduate career far more enjoyable and valuable than I thought possible! My prior research as a journalist at KCSB News helped me tremendously with working on the oral history collections at the Presidio Research Center. At KCSB, I was responsible for writing articles, conducting interviews, editing interviews, and hosting the biweekly newscast live from 5:00-5:30PM at 91.9FM (check it out!). One of the important aspects of KCSB is its status as a nonprofit, community radio station, meaning that I worked to highlight voices and perspectives that large corporate media stations tended to overlook, which I also sought to do during my time at the SBTHP.

A shot of the dozens of cassettes with recorded interviews that are part of the Walt Douglas collection. Photo by Celina Garcia.

As I started work on the oral history collection, I was tasked with organizing, editing, and annotating transcripts of oral histories recorded with community members by various SBTHP volunteers and staff members. During this project, I learned more about the technicalities of archival research and working with oral histories, like how one goes about editing a transcript for easier readability without discrediting someone’s distinctive voice and storytelling style. Simultaneously, I enjoyed getting to listen to the unique, entertaining, tragic, and crucial stories of Presidio culture bearers, like George “Bud”’ Decker, Kathy Chalfant, Cecily Johns, and, of course, local historian Mary Louise Days, who interviewed many of the participants whose transcripts I worked with.

Portrait of Kay Kakimoto Willis by Walter Douglas. From the Walter Douglas Portrait Collection (MS-15).

Overall, one of my favorite projects was converting cassette tape interviews into computer audio files that could then be described and made accessible to researchers. This project borrowed heavily from my KCSB skillset, and my familiarity with the Audacity software made this process a lot easier to pick up. Once the cassette was converted, the audio file would be run through Otter.AI, a transcription service, generating a (not necessarily accurate) matching transcript. The transcript I worked most closely with was Kay Kakimoto Willis’ interview with Walt Douglas, which is part of the  Walt Douglas Portrait and Oral History Collection. I would then parse back through the transcript, conducting research on specific places, people, and terms the software had failed to identify. After repeating this process multiple times, Dez and I collaborated to produce a set of digitization guidelines, making it easier for other interns, archivists, and researchers to follow a single, consistent workflow. These guidelines included instructions for cassette digitization, rules for transcript editing, a key for making annotations through Otter.ai, and helpful tips for navigating Audacity.

Photo by Celina Garcia.

I am incredibly grateful for my time at SBTHP. As an English major, something I heard often is that I will have trouble finding a job after college. As a KCSB member, I had always thought my “career backup” would be news and journalism. However, SBTHP has shown me the many possibilities that exist within Archives, Library Studies, and Museum Studies, and I feel excited and optimistic about exploring these possibilities in the future.

 

Who uses the Presidio Research Center?

Today we are pleased to share a post by one of our patrons at the Presidio Research Center.  SBTHP Thanks you, Tom, for sharing your perspective on why small archives and libraries like ours are a valuable resource for scholars!

by Thomas E. Tolley

Graduate Student Thomas Tolley, in Inis Mor Ireland. Photo courtesy of Thomas Tolley.

The Research Center at the Santa Barbara Presidio is  a remarkable archive. Built in some part on the collection of the late Richard Whitehead, along with many contributions from within and outside of the community, the Center is a rich, diverse resource for those who are compelled to pursue interests in local, state, and regional histories. Many people also use the Center to pursue family histories, looking for clues and answers to what components make up the mélange that all of us are.

I have had the fortune of using the Research Center over the course of two summers, as part of the process of completing my Dissertation (Anthropology-Historical Archaeology, expected Spring 2014). The first, in 2012, allowed me to reconfigure my dissertation topic into a more refined question, one that will hopefully reopen the discourse on California mission histories, and move the field into new areas of consideration. The accessible documents in the Research Center gave me the chance to remove unnecessary tangents, and essentially planted the seeds that grew into my opportunity to contribute to both Mission Studies and public knowledge as a whole. The second, this summer of 2013, I was able to locate additional original resources that support and reinforce my topic, and greatly aid in the process of making a compelling argument, as well as one that matters. To be blunt, my PhD would not be happening if it had not been for places like the Research Center.

I have over 20 years of business experience and CRM (Cultural Resource Management) experience, so I appreciate the amount of background research that needs to take place before many projects can get off the ground. Time is precious, and if you have resources you cannot find, that ends up costing time and money. For projects in construction, renovation, historic preservation, even in school projects and personal curiosity, the Research Center is the place to start. There is a great chance that you will find what you need there, and if by chance you do not, the staff will be able to tell you where on the Central Coast it is. That kind of ability, accessibility, and professionalism is invaluable.

Thomas Tolley is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at Syracuse University

 

The Presidio Research Center Presents: New Online Tools for You!

by Anne Petersen

Presidio Research Center. Photo by Michael H. Imwalle.

We are pleased to announce two new digital tools that will help researchers locate resources in the Presidio Research Center.   Digital tools like these empower users of the collection to find sources of interest before they make an appointment to visit, and allow for the most efficient use of our facility.

We have always posted pdfs of the finding aids for our manuscript collections on our website, a useful tool in itself, but last year the California Digital Library (CDL) authorized the creation of free accounts for small libraries, museums and historical societies outside the University of California system.  We jumped on this opportunity, and have been building our institutional home page on one of CDL’s major user interfaces, the Online Archive of California (OAC). OAC includes finding aids from manuscript collections state-wide, and is an incredible tool for researchers.

The Presidio Research Center’s page on the OAC.

Manuscript and record collections include original materials such as personal papers, correspondence, diaries and journals, organization and business records and scrapbooks. They often serve as the foundation for published histories.  By conducting general searches on OAC for your subject of interest, you can pull up finding aids at institutions that contain manuscript collections that fit your research interests.  Each collection has a finding aid that is fully searchable by keyword within the OAC. It includes detailed box and folder lists and inventories where available, either embedded within OAC or as an attached PDF.  For example, click here to see the finding aid for our Pearl Chase collection.  Finding aids contain rich information about each collection, including the size, types of materials included, biography of the donor (if appropriate) major subject areas, and often contain detailed box and folder lists of everything in the collection so you can narrow down exactly what you want to see. We will continue to add more finding aids to OAC, so it is worth checking back every month or so to see what’s new!

The Presidio Research Center maps and plans inventory.

We have also completed a new inventory of our maps and plans collection, and have made it available as a searchable PDF on our website here.   You can search any term through the “find” function, and call up the related entries.  If you are interested in browsing the inventory, it can be helpful to know that the inventory begins with historic maps of the Santa Barbara Presidio, and then moves into groupings of plans of structures within the city blocks associated with the Presidio site.  It then moves to maps and plans of structures within the City of Santa Barbara, the County of Santa Barbara, and moves out geographically from there.

We hope these new resources will make our collections more accessible to the public.  The Research Center collections page on our website is a simple reference page that includes links to all of our available digital resources. This is the best first place to start if you have questions about our collections. As always, you can make an appointment to visit the Presidio Research Center.  Just give me a call at (805) 966-5073 or send me an email at anne@sbthp.org.

Anne Petersen is the Associate Director for Historical Resources at the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation.