LDF Recollection: Innovating a Civil Rights Archive
LDF Archives Team (Shelby Wong, Ashton Wingate, Kimberly Barzola, Andrea Hill, Kayla Jenkins, Cassandra Mensah, Donna Gloeckner, Ruby Mangum, Reed Jaeger), Durable Digital (Peter Gassiraro, Alex Botteril, Shane Marsden, David Marsden, Angela Wolak)
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The NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) is a nonprofit law firm spearheading the fight for civil rights since 1940. In Fall 2024, the LDF Archives launched LDF Recollection, a public digital repository containing over 13,000 digitized and described court documents, attorney working files, photographs, and oral histories. This project furthers our mission to steward and share our collection documenting the historic and ongoing struggle for civil justice and political, educational, and economic equity. Working with our partners at Durable Digital, we have innovated a digital processing workflow that supports the unique preservation, access, and security needs of a legal civil rights archive by integrating our website with archival software and a customer relations management database.
A civil rights legal collection poses inherent preservation challenges, as most of our case files, institutional records, and correspondence contain Personally Identifiable Information (PII), legally sensitive material bound by attorney-client privilege, or documentation of internal legal strategies, which may put our clients and the communities that we serve at risk. As a result, our archives were restricted to internal use and external researchers upon request, with only a small selection of records digitized. In 2020, we received a Mellon Foundation grant to lay the groundwork for large-scale digitization of our physical collections, with the aim of providing as much access as possible to our 8,000+ boxes encapsulating over 80 years of civil rights work. To our knowledge, there were no preexisting digital preservation workflows accommodating the need for legal privilege review. Additionally, the existing metadata about our collections was disorganized, at times incomplete or repetitive, and not easily consolidated into a single system.
The solution we arrived at, through close collaboration with our partners at Durable Digital, was a processing workflow integrating Preservica, a Digital Asset Management software for archival collections, and Microsoft Dynamics, a highly customizable Customer Relations Management software, to interface with LDF Recollection, which serves as the public-facing repository for digitized records. Durable Digital, a website design and digital solutions firm, helped us customize the interface of Dynamics so that we can efficiently represent and describe entity-relationships, create and manage metadata, track and manage digitization projects, conduct privilege review, and view detailed audit trails. Preservica hosts the access copies and the metadata created in Dynamics, which are made accessible based on the security category determined during the privilege review process. In compliance with the OAIS Reference Model standards, both the access and preservation copies are stored in Microsoft Azure cold storage. Dynamics enables us to consolidate and manage data on every level of organization, encompassing both physical (e.g. a physical box in a storage location) and theoretical (a conceptual collection linked to a court case) organization. This is essential because we describe all records at the item level which provides invaluable context and accessibility, although this is usually too time and labor intensive for most archives to justify. Dynamics makes item-level description possible because it allows us to cascade data from a higher to lower conceptual entities – for example, a specific attorney could be linked to one case record, and this association would then be reflected in the description of every individual item record linked to that case. As seen below on the left, the resulting workflow closely resembles a typical archival processing workflow, with the inclusion of privilege review before ingestion. Below on the right is the project management feature in Dynamics, which shows how each processing stage is not only tracked, but the appropriate research, surveying, and quality control data is also documented and stored in Dynamics. After creating descriptive metadata and privilege review, records can also be ingested directly from Dynamics into Preservica. With the launch of LDF Recollection, the Legal Defense Fund can provide public access to nearly a century of records demonstrating our efforts to combat segregation, unjust persecution, voter suppression, and other forms of social injustice historically and continually perpetuated in America. We aim to empower researchers, educational institutions, and other members of the public to discover civil rights history through primary sources in the current climate of misinformation and erasure of these histories. Our unique digital infrastructure also provides a new model for other archives and cultural institutions with legally sensitive collections, seamlessly incorporating the necessary security measures into the digitization process and streamlining description.
Our work creating Recollection was recognized by the Society of American Archivists with the Archival Innovator Award and accepted as the topic of a presentation at the Digital Library Federation Conference in 2025. With this recognition, we hope to provide a robust model for other institutions with collections that represent histories of marginalized populations, facing a similar dilemma between protecting sensitive information and sharing these materials at a time when reliable information and diverse narratives are increasingly restricted. Additionally, we do not consider these systems complete but as a foundation to continue improving and building our capacity. We are currently working on integrating born digital processing capacity into Dynamics and hope to be able to continue preserving and sharing the legacy of the fight for civil rights for future generations.
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