Dickinson College, LGBT Center of Central PA Selected for State Grant

Members of the Pennsylvania Rural Gay Caucus with their hand-made banner at the Philadelphia gay pride parade circa 1976. Photo by Bari Lee Weaver.

Members of the Pennsylvania Rural Gay Caucus with their hand-made banner at the Philadelphia gay pride parade circa 1976. Photo by Bari Lee Weaver.

Funding will Help Catalog, Digitize LGBT History Project

The LGBT History Project, housed at Dickinson College’s Archives & Special Collections, has been awarded a $10,000 Historical & Archival Records Care Grant from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) and a matching grant for $15,000 from the Schlegel-Deibler Charitable Foundation. The grant and the matching gift will be used to fund a one-year archivist position to organize, catalog and digitize significant portions of the LGBT History Project collection.

The LGBT History Project began in 2012 and is a collaborative community archives effort to preserve the stories and history of LGBTQ+ people and activism in central Pennsylvania. In 2014, the LGBT Center of Central PA in Harrisburg and Dickinson’s Archives & Special Collections established a partnership in the initiative. The project is the fastest growing collection housed at Dickinson and one of the most frequently used. It currently includes approximately 150 video interviews and historical materials contributed by more than 80 donors. The documents include written accounts, photographs and artifacts, with items dating from the early 1970s through the early 2000s and addressing political activism, discrimination, religious life, the local response to HIV/AIDS, gay bar life and transgender advocacy. Cataloging and digitizing these materials will improve the visibility, discoverability and use of the collection, while making these records of historically marginalized people and communities from Pennsylvania available to a broader audience.

In 2014, the LGBT History Project won the prestigious J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists.

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Published January 6, 2020