Discussing the Elma Lewis Papers with Joy Zanghi
Joy Zanghi is the Elma Lewis Digital Project Librarian for the Digital Production Services at Snell Library. Joy spoke with Colleen Nugent McLean, CDS Coordinator, about her work with the Elma Lewis papers and the challenges of digitizing archival collections. Her comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Colleen: To start, could you introduce yourself and describe your role in Digital Production Services? I think it could be useful to hear about your general trajectory here at Northeastern.
Joy: Hello, my name is Joy Zanghi. I'm currently the Elma Lewis Digital Project Librarian in Digital Production Services in the library. This role is grant-funded by the City of Boston Community Preservation Act Grant, which was awarded in spring of 2025. My current role is to be the main project manager of this grant, which supports the digitization, description, and publication of the primary source materials from our four archival collections that document the work of Elma Lewis.
Before this, I was working on another grant funded project at Northeastern, the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive. I was the project archivist there from late 2023 to the end of 2025. And then I transitioned into this role in early 2026.
Colleen: Great, thank you. So who was Elma Lewis and what are the Elma Lewis papers?
Joy: Elma Ina Lewis lived between 1921 and 2004. She was an activist and arts educator who trained a full generation of African-American dancers, singers, musicians, actors, and visual artists throughout Boston. Both in the community in Boston and also nationally and internationally. She formed the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1950, which was one of the first arts institutions to really predominantly focus on Afrocentric arts and focus on teaching young Black Bostonians. And she established the National Center of Afro-American Artists in 1968. This was also followed by the creation of the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists. Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections has all four archival collections that document the work of Elma Lewis and the schools, associations, and museums she founded. Those collections are the Elma Ina Lewis Papers (which is her personal collection), the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts Records (which pertains to the school itself),
the National Center of the Afro-American Artist Records (which was a widely known national organization to promote Afro-centric art, both in the US and abroad), and then the Museum of the National Center, which hosted museum exhibitions and is still in existence today. These collections all really highlight and showcase Elma Lewis's influence on the Black Arts Movement
in Boston and capture how her ideas and techniques both spread nationally and then internationally as well. It’s been really amazing to see, in the actual collections themselves.
Although she passed away in 2004, her impact is very much still alive in the greater Boston area today. Like I said, the museum is still open and functional. They named a new executive director in the last year or so. It's in a phase of transition and transformation, but it's still very much active. There are still annual productions that Elma Lewis began back when she was at the height of her career, and they still continue today, including the Black Nativity, which is a production that I think is going on its 56th year in December this year. It's an annual program around Christmas. It's the Langston Hughes production of Black Nativity. And Elma Lewis started that a while back. It's amazing to see that it's still ongoing. So she was just like an amazing Boston powerhouse. And it's a real privilege to work on these collections and to see how her legacy still exists today.
Colleen: Yeah, she had such a long life too. I can imagine that they're really complex. I'm wondering when did Northeastern acquire the collections?
Joy: It was in the 1990s, so she was still alive. There's actually a video of Elma Lewis at the donation of her materials to Northeastern in the late 1990s. So she was alive and well and chose to put her records here, which I think is also really special and isn't always an opportunity that people have. So yeah, we've had her collections since the 90s. They were processed in the 90s, I believe. They've been really important in the archives collections. I know Molly Brown could speak a lot to the way people use these collections, but this digitization project is going to allow a lot more access at a much broader level.
Colleen: Yeah, I can imagine. That's very cool. That ties very well into the next question, which is about your role specifically in this project and also a bird's eye view of the whole initiative?
Joy: As I mentioned, it's a grant funded project from the City of Boston Community Preservation Act grant. Normally this is a grant program that works on construction projects. Actually, we're the first archive that they've ever worked with. They usually work on preserving historic buildings. So we're a bit of a guinea pig in this grant phase itself, but I think it's been a really good learning opportunity for both the City of Boston Preservation Act grant organization and for us here to see ways that we can use grants that might be predominantly for other areas and
target them for digitization funds. That grant provided the funding for the digitization of all those four collections I mentioned, as well as the labor involved in the post-production work. Post- production work includes quality control, making sure all the scans are looking good, getting all of the files into the digital repository service, and then describing the items with item-level cataloging.
So the digitization phase of the project resulted in the creation of over 120,000 digital materials. This spans both textual, photographic, and AV materials. The goal of the grant, in very brief terms, is just to improve access to the Elma Lewis collections by getting them online and searchable. My role is to oversee this and to ensure that we're accomplishing the grant deliverables in a timely and effective way. I work really closely with Drew Facklam, our metadata and digital projects supervisor in DPS, to design and implement workflows that support DRS ingest of the newly digitized materials, as well as the subsequent item-level cataloging. I also supervise four grant funded part-time staff who are responsible for doing a lot of the actual work that we're designing. They're working with item-level cataloging. I also work really closely with the folks in university archives and Special Collections. I work with Gina Nortonsmith, Daniel Lavoie, Molly Brown, and then the rest of us in DPS, Kim Kennedy, Drew Facklam, and Sarah Sweeney. We all work really closely to make sure that all the parts of the project are going smoothly. My role is a bit of a project manager to make sure everyone is up to date on the status and the progress of the work.
Colleen: Something I'm curious about when you're saying making the collections more accessible, how public is it?
Joy: That's a great question. At this point, it's hard because we have a goal of making it incredibly accessible, but at this point it's not at this broader level yet. It is currently in the DRS and we are working with Digital Commonwealth to do a scrape of our materials so that they'll be on Digital Commonwealth and beyond. They will be more accessibly available in collections beyond the DRS, probably within a few months. Our first Digital Commonwealth scrape is going to happen quite soon. So we will see the collections more broadly accessible through things like Digital Commonwealth and Digital Public Library of America.
Currently, they are publicly available through the DRS. The DRS has really great SEO [i.e. the way web search engines can discover digital items], so if you Google Elma Lewis at this point, you'll already see some of our digitized material online. There are a few audiovisual materials that have been restricted and some other private materials that we have to keep restricted from digital access. Just due to the nature of some of the private information, those are only going to be accessible in person. At this point, most of the materials that are online are widely available to the public in the DRS. But there is a plan and a goal to have it enter other digital repositories both in Massachusetts and more broadly
Colleen: I know for the Burnham Nobles Digital Archive, you came in for version two. I'm getting the sense you were a little bit more like involved in the initial thoughts of the Elma Lewis project. I wonder how the workflow development differed between the two?
Joy: Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm both at the beginning of this project and not, because I joined the project in January 2026 and the grant was awarded in spring 2025. There was a planning period in the bulk of 2025 when I was still working on the Burnham Nobles Digital Archive, while a lot of the project planning and digitization work was being handled. I really want to give Kim, Sarah and Drew and everyone in UASC a big shout out because they were managing all of this work before there was a project manager on board. Kim Kennedy handled all of the vendor communication and all of the work with the digitization workflows. So while I did join at a much earlier phase of the work, there was still a lot going on in the background before I ended up starting.
Something else that's pretty different about this project is the timeline. I have a little over a year from when I started in January 2026 and the projected end date in April 2027. This means it's a shorter timeline and the goal is to just do as much as we can. I say a lot of this workflow feels like building the plane as we're flying it because it's such a short timeline and it's so many items and so much material that we really want to do justice for. It feels like we are juggling a lot of things such as time constraints, labor restraints, but also wanting to do the best we can for Ms. Lewis and for her legacy and for this collection. This grant was awarded to us with the understanding that we won't be able to describe every single item in the collection, which is very different from the work on the CRRJ where everything needed to be done at the end date. We know it won't be fully complete. And that is a really hard mental shift to make as a grant employee to think normally I need to finish every single deliverable. But the grant is formatted in a way where we know it won't be done at the end of it, which is a really big challenge that I'm finding myself in and I think all of us are dealing with. But as we get closer to April 2027, the end date, I'm going to really focus on working on a transition plan with the folks in DPS to discuss how we can continue creating metadata and describing these collections. It's a really challenging, concurrent workflow.
There are a lot fewer people working on this than on the CRRJ project. And there's a lot more to describe. It means my part-time staff have to be incredibly flexible and communicative. I really get a lot of value in working with them and hearing where there are challenges in the workflow or issues or where there are sticking points that we could maybe move faster. And it allows for Drew and I to come together and then plan on ways to maybe tweak things here and there to move into a more effective process. In a dream world, you would have the workflow designed and then do the work, but that is just simply not how a one year and a few months grant project can proceed.
Colleen: Something I'm curious about: I'm imagining there's quite a bit of diversity of materials because there's four collections within these papers. Is that one of the other challenges with this ever-evolving workflow?
Joy: Yes, definitely. With the CRRJ, we cataloged 5 genre types. In this one, we are cataloging up to 20 genre types and different materials, which means cataloging is a lot slower. It means that instructions have to be made a lot more broad and cover a lot more genres. It means there's a lot more of a learning curve with the staff that we're supervising. But the way that we have gone about this process is by working one collection at a time.
Right now, our goal is to get through the Elma Ina Lewis papers, which are her personal papers, and have each item fully cataloged. At this point, all but one box is in the DRS. We're working on cataloging five of the boxes from that collection right now. We're going to have this one collection of fully described items as sort of a model of what it could be like if we had endless time and endless resources.
Once we finish with this one fully described set of items, we're going to pivot to the next three collections and we're going to modify our workflow to create more robust, what we call stub record metadata. That is just genre and title, but it doesn't include as much descriptive metadata as you would in a fully cataloged item. But our goal is to make sure these stub records are Digital Commonwealth compliant so that we can get as much as we can in the DRS and then Digital Commonwealth. So we're at this pivot point in the work where we're about to finish a pretty solid cataloging workflow for one collection. And then we're going to pivot into a less descriptive cataloging workflow, more just let's see how much we can get out and get accessible online with our remaining time.
Colleen: That makes sense, that is really interesting. Is there anything else you would like to add about the future plans of the project?
Joy: Like I said, digitization has been fully completed. So our main focus is working on improving access. But we are really focused on just getting them into the DRS and getting them as described as we can at this point. With upcoming plans, we're also going to make sure to create a traditional workflow for the folks who are still in DPS, to be able to imagine ways to add metadata as staffing and timing continues to exist.
Colleen: I'm always interested in what the frictions and the challenges are in digital work, but what are some challenges you have encountered with this work?
Joy: I definitely have a bunch of challenges that I would love to chat through, but I would say with this project I see different tiers of challenges. One of the biggest types of challenges, obviously with digital work and with a lot of this digital humanities work, is the fact that it is time sensitive and there are staffing limitations based on that time sensitivity. I think a lot of people don't realize how time intensive and labor intensive item-level cataloging is. There's also a lot we need to do before we even get to the item-level cataloging phase, which I think is one of the biggest challenges around communicating about this project. Because so much of the project revolves around creating accessibility and access to these records, which means getting them online and getting them described. But one of the hardest parts of this work actually happens before any of that can happen.
This is the phase I call the file splitting work of the project. The biggest challenge is a result of how collections were digitized, again, because of limited funding and timing. Vendors were digitizing textual materials on an archival folder-level. If you open up a box in the Elma Lewis collection and you pull out an individual folder, that is how the materials were digitized, which means you may have hundreds of pages relating to her correspondence in a single folder. So we will often have hundreds of pages of material in a PDF that we received from the vendors. The challenge is that the DRS and all of our existing cataloging standards are designed for item-level ingest and item-level cataloging, not folder-level. This means that we need to have our staff look through those hundreds of pages of PDFs and break the items down onto the item level. If I have hundreds of pages of cards that Elma Lewis has received, each one has to be made into one PDF of that one card. Then they can get into the DRS and then we can catalog it.
As I said, there were 120,000 digitized folders. So we have 120,000 digital items with hundreds of pages in them. The staff need to go through and quickly process where one thing ends and the other begins, before creating metadata such as genre, describing its extent, how many pages there are, and then get that into a spreadsheet. At that point we can do the DRS ingest, and then after that we can start cataloging. So one of the hardest parts of this work is explaining that cataloging can't happen until a lot of these other really long and in-depth workflow phases are finished.
I do think that this is one of the biggest challenges of the project, because I would have liked to have three plus more years to do all of this. To go through all of those pages, it sounds like it may be straightforward work to be able to identify when one item begins and the next end. But when you're looking at a scan of an archival folder, it can be really nuanced, challenging work. We know archival folders can be very messy, and the archival folders were processed in the 90s. This workflow can result in over 700 plus individual items being made from a single box of 20 folders and that is just the first step of the work.
Colleen: Have you done the file splitting for all four collections or just that first one?
Joy: Just the first one. Drew and I recently were talking about a way to combine the file splitting and item-level cataloging into a new workflow where in the next phase of file splitting, the items are going to get descriptive titles.
Colleen: Wow, that is so interesting. Were there other challenges you dealt with?
Joy: One other aspect of the challenging work is that while we were doing file splitting, we were also collecting name authority work because name authorities are instrumental in accurate cataloging. We want to make sure we're referring to people with the most authoritative form of their name. This will increase access in other collections, such as Digital Commonwealth. It improves access to people, and it also really highlights her personal network. One of the most amazing aspects of this collection is the breadth of Elma Lewis's reach. She was close with the Kennedy’s. She was communicating with Henry Kissinger at some point. She had an amazing impact on the world around her. She received a presidential medal for the arts. She was a MacArthur fellow. She was a really, really well-known figure in her time. So gathering this name authority data has been instrumental in capturing the web of Elma Lewis's network. For just her personal collection, we've already generated over 3,000 personal and corporate name authorities of people who communicated and worked with her.
This work has also been incredibly time consuming and very valuable, and can be used as the basis of local name authority control for other future digital projects. As we're looking at the next collections, we're going to reduce the amount of time spent researching name authorities. We're going to prioritize creating descriptive titles and getting the files online. But again, we were using her personal papers as a model of what could be done if we had endless time and resources.
One of the other challenges with the name work that has been really exciting and interesting is we have a lot of women who refer to themselves as Mrs. and then their husband's name. But it is not best practice to refer to them as these names. So we had to research to try to get to the bottom of who a lot of these women were, who we couldn't identify. I'd say we have about 10 or so in that list of 3,000 that we still cannot identify. So even just in this one sector of this larger workflow of the name authority work, there is a lot of nuance and additional research and work that has to go into ensuring that we have the most ethical metadata practices being represented in our work.
Another challenge with the workflow is the fact that Elma Lewis worked with many minors, so we have to be really sensitive about privacy. This means during the file splitting and item-level cataloging, we cannot just skim. We have to look pretty closely at these materials to make sure we are redacting when we have to and restricting when we have to. There are challenges along the way that require a lot of additional research and time that I think lead to every grant project having a challenge of like, oh, I wish I had endless time to spend on each of these problems.
Colleen: That's really interesting, there is so much complexity to this work. Is there anything you would like to share with the CDS readers about the Elma Lewis Digital Project?
Joy: I really wanted to shout out to my part-time staff. I feel sometimes that work is invisible, especially on such a digitized and remote project. But it could not be done without Alexandra Cohen, Annie Ross, Evan McGonagill, and Kate Lonergan. They are the ones doing the file splitting, the item-level cataloging, collecting all of those 3000 names and name authorities, and creating details about them in our massive web of Elma Lewis network that we're working on. It's just an incredibly collaborative project and is really such an immense amount of work for a rather small team. It could not be done without the amount of the people that we have.