Welcome to Project of Record, a spotlight on cool archival projects CAA members are working on! Each installment of this series will feature a member and a notable project they think may be of interest to our wider membership.

We hope Project of Record will strengthen the sense of community across CAA and help foster connections between members that may be doing similar work, facing common challenges, or celebrating successful projects.

Do YOU have a project you’d like to share in Project of Record? Contact Elizabeth Buchanan (s.elizabeth.buchanan@gmail.com).

In this installment, Cheryl Ziegler discusses her work to digitize the Union League Club Newsletter.

Your name, organization, and position:

Cheryl Ziegler, archivist (part time) of the Union League Club of Chicago.

Summarize the archives project you’d like to highlight:

Understanding the project requires a little history. The Union League Club of Chicago was founded in 1879, chiefly as a social, civic leadership and philanthropic organization. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with labor unions, but was derived from the American Civil War era Union League of America. You name a historical event in Chicago or in Illinois, chances are likely that club members were involved - for example, the Columbian Exposition, the Chicago Crime Commission, the Committee on Race Relations after the Red Summer, these all had Union Club members as leaders. Around 1919 or 1920, the club founded a Boy’s Club for “wayward youths” to learn job skills. One of the professions they could study was printing in the Boy’s Club print shop and to get them started, the club began soliciting its members to write the Union League Club Newsletter.

The newsletter ran off and on for years, with articles about the club, local news, national news, all sorts of things. We have these physical newsletters from 1920 to the current time. I’ve wanted for a long time to get them digitized and get them up on the Chicago Collections Consortium portal. This is probably my biggest digitization project to date, and it’s not finished yet.

How long has the project taken so far, from conception to present? What were your goals and have they changed over time? How much work do you have left?

It was an annual goal for 2023 to get started on the project, but it wasn’t until December of 2023 that I started having conversations with IT and pulling together specific, nitty-gritty information that I would need in our proposal like technical specifications, how we were going to handle storage and make the files accessible. Coming up with some kind of naming convention was challenging!

By the start of 2024, I started the actual prep and inventory, which entailed pulling a physical copy of each newsletter and doing pagination, which was the nightmare of this whole thing! Remember the Boy’s Club print shop, where the wayward youth were learning their craft? They did a great job, but the page numbers were wonky. Sometimes they forgot to change the volume number. So I started an Excel spreadsheet inventory to track volumes and page numbers, and it evolved to include information on size format (the physical size of the newsletters changed over time), physical condition, etcetera. The prep and inventory went on between October to January of 2025, while in the meantime my funding proposal had to go to three committees of the Club to get permission to the digitization contract out to bid. By February we had a contract, and the actual digitization started in April. We’ve hit a few bumps in the road, but we’re maybe about halfway through. We’re looking at October or November 2025 completion.

What were the biggest challenges in this project? What resources did you consult? Did you apply for/receive outside funding?

The inventory was huge. One logistical thing that came up right away was that there are gaps in our series of individual newsletters. Fortunately they had a habit of gathering up a year of newsletters and binding them, so there are bound books of many of the missing years but in some cases I’ve had to backtrack on those missing ones and unbind books to get a clear scan. There’s also a continuing challenge to making the documents accessible to the public, because the Chicago Collections can’t upload PDFs right now. I would have to upload a surrogate with a PDF link back to our internal storage, and I can’t allow unlimited access to the Club’s system. That’s one of those details that still needs to be figured out. Uploading a flat format would be much easier, but the OCR’d pdfs will be a GAME CHANGER for research uses of this collection. I have a really high level inventory that someone made years ago with headlines for the biggest articles, but making them available as searchable text will really expand the usability of the collection.

We’re a 501 c7, not a C3, so I can’t go after most of the grants or money that is out there and available for this kind of work. I put a lot of my questions out on the CAA Listserv, which I love. People are so generous with their advice, so I did a lot of talking with people that I know and also with people that I didn’t know until I reached out to them. There’s a lot of information out there on digitization - the LoC, NARA, SAA - but honestly I think CAA was one of the biggest resources when it came down to figuring out what the norm was.

What’s a fun or interesting thing you want to tell us that has happened in the course of this project?

When I was doing the inventory, I would start reading the articles and get caught up! There are things like…Senator Dick Durbin brought Barack Obama here for lunch before he had announced his candidacy. So there’s a little newsletter article that talks about Durbin having lunch with Obama and saying, “You know what you really should do is run for president.”

What advice would you give to someone starting on a similar project? Can CAA members contact you about similar projects?

Patience. Document, document, document - write EVERYTHING down. Before you actually launch into the project make sure that you’ve at least tried to cover your bases with planning. You can’t control everything. Stuff is going to happen. But if you’ve played out all the scenarios in your mind or on paper, then when the surprises happen it isn’t tragic - you can punt! I’m happy to talk, reach out to to me at cziegler@ulcc.org.