Project Description
Documentary Focus:
Our archive is primarily focused on documenting the history of Greek life organizations created by historically marginalized communities in order to create spaces for their community. We aim to highlight their original charter date and timeline of their origins at the University of Michigan, in relation to other Greek life organizations. By placing emphasis on the timeline of these organizations' origins, we hope to paint a picture of how and why these organizations came together in response to the exclusion they faced from other predominantly white, male fraternities. Funding for Black, brown, and cultural greek orgs has already faced scrutiny at UofM (Menrinetsang, 2025). With recent DEI cuts and the federal discourse claiming that racial identity-based organizations may discriminate against white students, we wanted to use this archive to showcase the importance of these organizations as responses to discrimination and show how they were built on inclusion rather than exclusion (Cokley, 2025). We seek to document the true histories and impact of cultural Greek organizations at UofM in an effort to prevent misrepresentation
Consideration of archival concepts and practices:
Throughout the process of building our online archive, we considered several archival concepts. We mainly focused on representation in arrangement and description. Because most of the work in our online archive focused on selecting items, recording metadata, and then arranging and organizing them based on their respective fraternity or sorority, we felt that this was where we could build off of various archival concepts.
“The silent archivist is an archivist with no story to tell” (Duff & Harris, 2002, p.283). When creating this archive, we recognized that this was an opportunity to portray a story. We became increasingly aware throughout this semester, through course readings and lecture discussions, that the arrangement and description of materials can highlight certain views over others. Also, archives only represent a part of the story. In order to successfully tell this story, we had to include substantial background information on each of the fraternities and sororities we chose to highlight. We also had to choose items that contributed to that story, not muddle it. Meaning, with the limited time and resources we had, we had to choose items that represented the people and what they accomplished while members of these organizations.
Furthermore, we recognized the importance of maintaining an item’s meaning as well as the meaning and history behind these organizations themselves. “When taken out of their original milieu, however, context is lost” (Yakel, 2003, p.24). While portraying the story throughout our archive, we did not want to speak for these organizations. Instead, we wanted them to be able to speak for themselves. This led us to use their own words when describing the history, origins, and mission of the organizations—typically taken from the chapter or the national organization’s page. This is such an important aspect of curating and building an archive because the context can be so easily lost.
Criteria for record selection:
We chose items based on their association with the organizations we mentioned in this archive. So, for example, we found records associated with Alpha Kappa Alpha that included photographs, scanned letters, and flyers for sorority events. We found all of our items from the Bentley Library’s online database. All of the items we chose had been digitized, naturally, and they came from a variety of collections.
In addition to selecting records associated with specific Greek organizations, we chose them if they helped tell the story of the organization itself. Questions we asked ourselves while going through the Bentley’s items were, “Does this record showcase the members of this organization? Does it help tell the story of how this organization came to be? Does it offer insight into the operations and events of the organization?” After assessing the various records under these criteria, we were able to select our grouping of items and assign them to the relevant Omeka pages.
Target user group:
Our target user groups include University of Michigan students, researchers and historians focusing on the history of UofM, race, or Greek life, as well as current members of the fraternities and sororities mentioned in this archive.
Depending on the experience of the user, some may lack archival intelligence, meaning they have a hard time finding and using resources properly in an archive. As archivists and designers of digital archives, it is our job to help users find and understand the resources within a database or repository (Garcia, 2017).
We anticipate that our users will be looking for mostly primary sources. Items such as photographs of members and their environments, letters, and even flyers promoting the events hosted by the various fraternities and sororities. We also anticipate users looking for relatively quick and easy access to these materials. Therefore, we made these items available on both the browse page and their respective organization pages. Also, we included tags on items to categorize them and help users find them more easily.
Perspectives:
Out of the entire 56 Greek letter organizations at UofM, we were not able to represent all of them. We were able to include 10 organizations on our site. Meaning, each organization received a page. However, we only included items for 7 of these organizations. Altogether, we have 19 items representing Alpha Kappa Alpha, Alpha Phi Alpha, Theta Delta Chi, Phi Beta Sigma, Kappa Alpha Psi, Omega Psi Phi, and Delta Tau Lambda. There is an emphasis on older material. Most of our items come from the early 20th century. We do not have enough information on younger organizations or more recent documentation of their presence on campus, with the exception of Alpha Kappa Alpha.
Additionally, our site structure is set up in a way that clearly shows which orgs are underrepresented in the archive or completely absent. Some pages noticeably have no items, which represents the lack of digital records available. Our goal is not to speak on behalf of the organizations, but to shed light on their contributions