Palos Verdes Library District (PVLD) in California holds a unique role in preserving local history for the community. As a smaller library with limited resources, PVLD needed a system that could streamline digital collections management, support community engagement and consolidate disparate collections. Monique Leahey Sugimoto, Archivist & Adult Services Librarian is the archivist and local history librarian at PVLD and manages the archives primarily alone, balancing these responsibilities with her reference librarian duties. The library faced significant challenges in maintaining accessibility to its digital local history collections, as its previous platform, Islandora, was reaching end-of-life support, prompting an urgent need for a new solution.

Challenges

PVLD’s Islandora instance was managed by a third-party vendor, who decided to cease supporting Islandora. This change required PVLD to either self-manage the platform or find a new solution – a daunting prospect given their limited staffing and technical resources. Monique was keen on consolidating collections previously scattered across various locations into a single, accessible platform. She emphasised that this change came at a critical time, as the library was expanding its focus on engaging the community with local history and digitizing more materials.

Solution: Choosing Recollect

Recollect initially caught Monique’s interest at a California Library Association event, where she met Recollect’s team and explored the platform’s functionality. Reflecting on this first interaction, she noted that Recollect’s solution flexibility and community engagement tools stood out as ideal for PVLD’s needs, allowing her to envision a more interactive and accessible future for the library’s local history collections. “The flexibility of Recollect was a big thing,” Monique stated, highlighting Recollect’s ability to bring collections together into one interface. While PVLD explored other platforms, Monique advocated for Recollect, recognising its unique alignment with the library’s goal to collect, preserve and share the history of the community.

Implementation

Recollect’s flexibility proved instrumental during PVLD’s migration, though the process required Monique to navigate a learning curve and quickly adapt to Recollect’s templates and configuration tools. She worked with Recollect support, who guided her and the team through the platform’s modular tools and capabilities to create solutions for PVLD’s content. As the new platform had significantly more capabilities and required some adjustment, Monique ultimately found Recollect to be efficient and user-friendly.

With funding assistance from PVLD’s Friends of the Library for implementation, the library successfully transitioned to Recollect and began uploading content. Monique shared how Recollect’s ingest process helped streamline her workflows, enabling volunteers and interns to assist in metadata creation, tagging and organising files. The flexibility in Recollect has allowed Monique to consider new and different ways of working with the community, reconsider how the library presented material and allowed her to change and configure the website as she and the library needed.  Over time, Monique’s workload has been reduced significantly.

Impact and Benefits

Since adopting Recollect, PVLD has experienced numerous benefits. The library’s digital local history collections are now centralised and accessible to the public, allowing community members to interact with and contribute to local history projects. Monique highlighted several unique engagement initiatives, including a collaboration with a local artist to blend historical photographs with sketches of the area, and a long-term project called the ‘40 Families’ that catalogues the history of local Japanese farming families in a more interactive format than ever before.

Community members have responded positively to the enhanced access and interactivity. One notable contribution included an artefact from a former DJ at a local skating rink, complete with a nostalgic playlist from the 1980s. “People love it,” Monique shared, noting how such items bring local history to life. Recollect’s tagging and collaboration features have made it easier for patrons to add their own memories and stories, fostering a deeper sense of community engagement.

Future Plans

Looking ahead, PVLD plans to continue expanding its digital offerings and to leverage Recollect’s tools to their full potential. Monique and her team remain committed to maximising the platform’s capabilities and anticipate exploring more creative uses for Recollect’s exhibit and storytelling functions.

In her words, “The sky’s the limit when you are thinking about Recollect because there are so many different ways to do and manage things.” This sentiment captures PVLD’s confidence in Recollect as a platform that supports both Monique’s vision and the library’s mission of preserving and celebrating the history of the Palos Verdes community.