[Colorado-Talk] News clipping from Englewood Herald yesterday

Wed Sep 16 19:29:51 UTC 2020

Hello All:

You may have not run across this article yet about our Preservation project,
so I thought I would post it here.  It is from the Englewood Herald. Sept
14, 2020

Peggy Chong,

Englewood Herald 

Preserving blind Coloradans' history

Records going back more than a century are being digitized

<https://englewoodherald.net/uploads/original/20200914-190026-a6cbbfa18a.jpg
> 

Julie Deden is the director of the Colorado Center for the Blind.

FILE PHOTO BY DAVID GILBERT

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Posted Monday, September 14, 2020 7:54 pm

Jessica Gibbs
jgibbs at coloradocommunitymedia.com

More than a century's worth of records now packed into boxes and storage
containers in the basement of the Colorado Center for the Blind will soon be
transformed into a comprehensive, digital history and made available to the
public.

Members of the National Federation of the Blind of Colorado are in year two
of a five-year project to digitally preserve records of the state's blind
community - before the documents deteriorate or are lost.

Most importantly, project leaders said, the history will finally be
accessible to the very community it's written about.

"This is a really big project, and this is important because blind people's
history is not being told," said Peggy Chong, who is leading the archival
effort. "By and large, we don't learn about our own history."

Both the National Federation of the Blind of Colorado and the Colorado
Center for the Blind are based in Littleton.

Chong, an Aurora resident, has been a member of the national organization
for 50 years, joining at age 14 because her mother and three sisters were
blind, she said.

She moved to Colorado two years ago and quickly set to work learning the
local organization's history, cataloging artifacts and taking on the
archival project.

There are a variety of documents and artifacts waiting to be digitized,
Chong said.

Meeting minutes dating back to the early 1900s are hand-written. Documents
exist in several versions of braille and need transcribing. Old newspaper
clips are fading. Some records were damaged by a basement flood at the
center, or simply old age.

Chong's main goal is to make this history available to the blind community
in Colorado, she said, but she also aims to better inform the community at
large. The organization will make the digital archive available to libraries
and universities once it's complete.

Then maybe, Chong said, creators in entertainment like screenwriters or
playwrights will be inspired by characters that don't fit tropes about the
blind. She envisions stories about the blind legislators making a difference
in their states, or blind entrepreneurs opening their own businesses.

Scott LaBarre, president of National Federation of the Blind of Colorado
since 2005, said Colorado is lucky to have Chong.

She has become known as "the blind history lady" for her efforts preserving
history about the blind, said LaBarre, who is blind and lives in Centennial.

"I think it's critical that we understand where we came from as a
population, as a community," LaBarre said. "It gives us a lot of information
about how much we've accomplished and how much more we have yet to
accomplish. So, I think it's a very important project."

LaBarre said he's most eager to see the early part of his organization's
history clearly laid out, which he described as the dawn of a "growing
movement of blind people taking matters into their own hands."

LaBarre, a lawyer who runs his own Denver law firm, said the public can
learn about the National Federation of the Blind of Colorado's roots, how
they organized and advocated for blind residents in the state.

"For a long time and all throughout our country's history and much of the
world's history, there have always been organizations for the blind," he
said. "But they weren't the blind representing themselves and determining
for themselves what the future would be."

Julie Deden, director of the Colorado Center for the Blind, said the
finished digital archive will show how far blind Coloradans have come. Deden
grew up in modern day Centennial and was born blind. She has served as the
center's director for 22 years.

"When we have access to our own history, it gives us the opportunity and I
guess the impetus to look at, where do we come from, and where do we want to
go from here," she said.

Having history available to them also gives blind community members "a
newfound reverence" for the pioneers who helped create organizations like
the National Federation of the Blind of Colorado, she said, or advocate for
the community's needs.

The project's next step will be finding dozens of volunteers to help
transcribe documents that do not scan well, she said.

Time is ticking. Chong said records about the blind are disappearing across
the country.

As schools for the blind have closed in various states, the facilities'
records were often discarded or lost. When blind individuals pass on, their
families sometimes toss items like diaries or records written in braille,
because no one can read them.

In Colorado, Chong wants to stop that from happening.

"Our history is not important enough for storage. It's not important enough
to spend precious archiving money on. It's up to us to do that," Chong said.
"It's important that we preserve it and we do it before it's destroyed or
lost to the wind."

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