User:IbsenIbsen/sandbox

The Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is an online resource created by the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusets in collaboration with more than thirty international colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, and private collections and was established to enable researchers to locate and make use of transgender-related materials in digital and physical collections. It serves as a finding aid for archival materials and an online hub for born-digital materials and digitized historical materials. On its History and Purpose page, they note: In order to address these significant barriers to the accessibility of trans history, the DTA virtually merges disparate archival collections, digital materials, and independent projects with a single search engine. With rich primary source materials and powerful search tools, the DTA offers a generative point of entry into the fascinating and expansive world of trans history.

The creation of this resource makes available materials that were previously unavailable online or very difficult to find in archival collections. Because the term transgender is relatively new, materials processed in archives prior to the 1990s may not contain the now widely-accepted descriptive term, so this digital repository seeks to bridge that gap. The DTA contains over 2300 items including newsletters, periodicals, photographs, and zines and according to one of the originators of the project, "anything related to 'trans-ing gender.'"

The digital repository received the 2017 C.F.W. Coker Award from the Society of American Archivists that awards "finding aids, finding aid systems, innovative development in archival description, or descriptive tools that enable archivists to produce more effective finding aids."