Overview

The Yale Community Voices Archive (YCVA) aimed to gather, preserve and make available a broad range of digital materials related to campus life—with an emphasis on diversity and inclusion—for teaching and research. Over a multi-year period, Yale students, faculty, and staff contributed digital content including photographs, videos, and text.

Started in 2016 by Carol Chiodo, a postdoctoral associate in the Digital Humanities Lab, and continued by Yale University Library’s Manuscripts and Archives, YCVA responded to the use of social media by individuals and organizations to chronicle and debate significant issues by providing a participatory platform in which community stakeholders could upload and annotate submitted materials.

Contributors to the archive had the option to make their content available or to close it for a period of 25 years from the date of submission, after which it will be made available to the global community. Individuals retain copyright to the contributions they created. Should Yale community members wish to publish from a contributor’s work, beyond what is provided under fair use, they will need to contact the individual contributor for permission.

Content provided by contributors will be preserved in perpetuity and will be made available to the Yale community and beyond for teaching and research purposes.

For questions about the project, please contact Manuscripts and Archives. To see and use the underlying code for YCVA-which is open source and published under an MIT license–visit the Digital Humanities Lab’s GitHub Repository.