Description
RECOMMENDATION: Discretionary grant of $30,000 to the Museum of Chinese in America ( http://www.mocanyc.org/ ) for creation of an online portal for its oral histories collection
The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) is dedicated to preserving and presenting the history, heritage, culture and diverse experiences of people of Chinese descent in the United States. MOCA began as a community-based organization founded in 1980 by Jack Tchen (at NYU) and Charlie Lai, with help from Chinese American artists, historians and students who felt that the memories of the early generations of Chinese Americans would be lost without oral history, photo documentation, research, and collecting efforts. MOCA was first located on Mulberry Street, in the heart of Manhattan’s Chinatown, in the century-old school building that was once Public School 23. In 2009, the Museum moved to its current Chinatown location, a space on Centre Street designed by Maya Lin.
Even before the move, at MOCA’s invitation I had visited the Mulberry Street location to discuss possible Foundation support for cataloguing its extensive collections and archives. Not surprisingly, the move to Centre Street took precedence, and a subsequent series of leadership changes at the organization suggested it was not ready to take on this project. The organization has stabilized under president Nancy Yao Maasbach, who has been at the helm since 2015. Prior to joining MOCA, Maasbach served as executive director of the Yale-China Association.
Over the last several years, MOCA has made strides in organizing its collections and archives, still housed in the Mulberry Street building, with support from, among others, the National Historical Publications & Records Commission. Most recently, it received $700,000 from New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs for renovations and the purchase of equipment necessary to create a learning center and digital collections hub at the Centre Street location.
The requested grant would assist with readying one component of its collections—oral histories—for the new leaning center. These interviews, in English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Toisanese, are in demand by researchers, but are only accessible on site, and MOCA’s current capacity as well as the fragile state of many recordings limits the number of researchers the Museum can accommodate. Our funds would enable MOCA to develop an online portal and populate it with at least 50 interviews identified from among the selected oral history collections listed in the proposal. Each would be catalogued, remastered and digitized over the grant period, and the material made available through the searchable Oral History Metadata Synchronizer, a digital tool developed by the University of Kentucky Libraries to enhance online access to oral histories.
MOCA is the largest repository of Chinese American archival material in the world. The proposed project fits into the Museum’s longer-range plan to make its rich resources available to scholars and the public not only in New York City but more broadly through the Internet. Our grant would cover compensation for interns to assist collections and archives staff; the processing and digitization of the oral histories; the creation of guides for accessing the material through the Museum’s digital collections hub; and outreach to heighten visibility of MOCA’s online resources. If the pilot is successful, the Asia Program would be willing to entertain a larger request from MOCA to make more of the oral histories, relating stories of Chinese American experiences, available to interested audiences.
