Earlier in the year Ann Matsuuchi (wiki user:Mozucat) and Ximena Gallardo (wiki user:Doctorxgc) had done a pilot project in which several of their students developed the Wikipedia article HIV/AIDS in New York City based on source material and insights collected in the Ed Koch Archives. On Thursday 10 November I visited them at their school for the opening of an expansion of that project with a new group of students.
Ed Koch was mayor of New York from 1978 – 1989. This position at this time made him uniquely influential in discussions about HIV and LGBT issues. At the advent of HIV in the early 1980s, NYC got more attention as a model for responding to HIV than any other city. Koch himself kept his sexuality hidden in a way that would seem strange in any other place and time other than the United States in this period, and claimed to be heterosexual while being highly secretive and willing to allow others to repeatedly raise questions in the media about whether he was gay. He advocated for acceptance of gay men while not advocating for gay rights, instead being approachable and somewhat neutral. Some people say that he did not do enough to respond to HIV, and others say that he played a political game to remain safely neutral while advocating to the extent that a neutral player could.
LaGuardia is a community college in the CUNY network. Ed Koch’s estate recently (~2015) released his mayoral archives to LaGuardia Community Colleges own LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, and now the school is promoting them for the insight they can provide into how everyone in correspondence or meeting proceedings with the mayor responded to HIV at that time. It is uncommon for a community college to host high prestige archives of international interest, and I would say that these Ed Koch archives are part of a story that could conceivably be told long into the future of human history. The convergence of politics, NYC’s story as America’s primary cultural narrative, an enigmatic mayor and cast of other personalities made big, the LGBT rights movement, a clash with the pharma industry over research and access to treatment, a new sort of community organization, and a the large number of deaths in a relatively small community makes the history of what happened in NYC in the 1980s a place and era for endless reflection.
In the next phase of the project about 6 students have committed to develop Wikipedia articles using materials from the archives. Ann and Ximena are continuing to oversee their contributions to Wikipedia but this time the archives themselves are granting more staff time to assist the students and the project. I think this is an exciting project for several reasons.
Precedent of surfacing archives in Wikipedia
Wikipedia has a policy of not publishing original research. The intent of that policy is that Wikipedia should be a summary of what is already published, and not a presentation of personal knowledge which has not already been published in reliable sources. I think that in the future that archival material will become easier to access without visiting a physical location and viewing physical papers, and that people will forget how difficult and uncommon doing archival research was before digitization. Even now, most archives which digitize their content still place enough restrictions on accessing their digital collections that the usual way to access digitized archives is to physically visit the archives and browse them on a computer which they keep in house but do not have connected to the Internet. I know that it will not make sense to researchers in the future looking back, but the current philosophy is that all sorts of knowledge institutions have a desire for people to physically come to them and use their content while present in their brick and mortar building. Because of the usual difficulty in accessing archives, Wikipedia does not have many policies or conversations about how the “no original research” policy applies to archives.
From a wiki perspective, the strange thing about archives is that often they contain public, published information which was not published widely. The intent behind the “no original research” rule is to maintain quality on Wikipedia by tying Wikipedia’s content to sources. However, if archives contain things like city government paper records which were published in the dozens or hundreds of paper copies, such as summaries of city council or committee meetings, then that information is published, and can be a reliable source for information, but from a non-wiki perspective studying such information and republishing it would be called “original research”. In other words, it is “original research” in that anyone working archives could make a new compilation of narratives which were published but never widely available, but it is not “original research” in the wiki jargon sense of being content without the backing of citations without reliable sources. There are not many examples in the wiki community of anyone studying archives and surfacing rare archival material in Wikipedia articles, so this Ed Koch archives project sets a precedent for understanding how Wikipedia and archives can work together to make special collections more accessible.
High profile of the collection
Ed Koch is a high-profile personality. Any mayor of New York City has some historical notability, and Ed Koch is additionally interesting as a major personality and face in thinking about how the United States responded to HIV/AIDS. From here on, if anyone ever asks questions about how society responded to the advent of HIV/AIDS, it seems likely that Ed Koch’s actions would be profiled as one of the model responses. NYC mayors do all sorts of historically significant things just by virtue of being in NYC, but HIV/AIDS as a social and cultural occurrence is something that people around the world continue to discuss. Even details which are surfaced and circulated from this archive could work their way into history books. Although there are all kinds of interesting topics to study, I feel that the history of HIV in NYC at this time has greater than average potential to be of interest to more people internationally for a longer period of time than many other study topics which I encounter. I feel that I can say that the Ed Koch collection is a high profile collection with which to engage.
Unusual opportunity for meaningful research for first and second year undergraduate students
Most undergraduate students do not publish original research at all. Among those who do publish research, often the research is not meaningful. Among those who do publish meaningful research, typically they are guided directly by a mentor who is doing a significant part of the research, and the undergraduate student combines their thoughts with the mentor’s in a shared publication. If an undergraduate student publishes research, probably the opportunity arises in their third or fourth years at the end of their studies, and not as soon as they start their program. When there are research opportunities for undergraduate students, those almost always happen in four-year university programs and not two-year college programs.
I am thrilled that LaGuardia Community College is able to organize this program for students at the beginning of their undergraduate studies to research archives and publish findings in Wikipedia, where they will actually be read by a large and relevant audience for years or indefinitely into the future. Besides the research project’s output being interesting, the very fact of the research project itself is interesting.