Jackie Toce, Head of Technical Services at the Hilton C. Buley Library, has spent the last seven years working to digitize the papers of former New Haven mayor, John DeStefano. These papers include items such as budgets, city agreements, and other documents related to initiatives associated with DeStefano’s time in office, like the Livable City Initiative, School Change, and New Haven Promise. Thanks to Toce's work, you can access the DeStefano papers here. We asked Toce to tell us the story of how the papers were acquired by Buley library and the efforts she put into making them available online.
In 2013, around the time of his retirement, John DeStefano approached former SCSU president Dr. Mary Papazian, seeking a place to host his mayoral papers. Hilton C. Buley Library, centrally located in New Haven and dedicated to preservation and information accessibility, seemed the ideal solution. Dr. Papazian spoke with former library director Dr. Christina Baum and arranged for Jackie Toce and the then head of Technical Services Dr. Cindy Schofield to spearhead the project.
Toce and Schofield spent three weeks in City Hall conducting an inventory of 90 bankers boxes of DeStefano papers, making lists of all of the documents in each folder. Once the initial inventory was complete, the State Librarian signed off on the transfer of government documents and the bankers boxes went to Buley Library. Then the real work began. Everyone in the technical services department pitched in to help scan the documents, including library faculty, staff, university assistants, and student workers. If an item was too large for the scanners or of poor quality, it was photographed instead. Toce estimates that about 5% of the papers needed to be photographed. “I think the hardest thing with digitizing was the quality control,” Toce said. “You have to find a worker that you know that you can trust to scan and pay attention. We have [graduate student] Amanda [Damon] right now and she’s so detailed.” It took five years to scan all of the documents.
Before a scanned image is loaded into the digital collection, Toce checks for quality, editing the image for clarity or rescanning the document if necessary. Next, she looks through the document, blacking out personal information such as social security numbers. Then she uploads the file and creates metadata to describe the document so that it is discoverable in the search platform. Much of the metadata creation consists of adding Library of Congress subject headings to the record as well as adding a city department field, since DeStefano categorized his papers in this way. This means that users can search the collection by departments, such as “Board of Education.”
Toce shared some highlights of the local history represented in the DeStefano papers, including details of DeStefano’s involvement in the New Haven Promise program, a part of the School Change initiative that provides scholarships to New Haven residents—one among many initiatives planned to improve the city of New Haven and the lives of its residents.
Among the historical events documented in the collection is DeStefano’s involvement with a Supreme Court case addressing the civil rights of firefighters that took place in 2003. Preserving and providing access to the local historical record is an important part of Buley Library’s contribution to SCSU’s service for the public good. DeStefano’s remarks on the ruling for Ricci v. DeStefano in 2009 are now part of the library’s digital collection.
Faculty and students have already made use of our DeStefano collection for research and classroom exercises. “I think the most [requests] I’ve gotten [have] been about the School Change,“ Toce said, referring to a program designed to improve the school system in New Haven. “That’s the most popular thing.” Those who have expressed interest in using the collection for research include SCSU and Yale students studying local politics. Toce notes that she occasionally receives requests for documents that have been digitized, but not yet added to the digital collection. She said, “If it’s not uploaded, I’ll go find it and upload it for them.”
Jonathan Wharton, associate professor of political science and urban affairs at SCSU has been studying the DeStefano papers. We spoke to Wharton to ask him about his project, as well as Nick Alexiades, an undergraduate political science student working on his thesis with Wharton. Wharton has made use of the DeStefano Papers in support of his own research and guided students toward the resource when applicable.
Wharton’s area of specialty centers on economic development and mayoral leadership. “I’m especially interested in tax abatements, gentrification, redevelopment, zoning, planning, those kinds of various things,” he told us. He has been able to supplement his conversations with relevant political figures with records and data on these topics, preserved in the papers of the DeStefano Collection.
This collection has provided valuable support beyond Wharton’s research, allowing him convenient access to historical project files that could inform decision-making in his work on the City Planning Commission. “I have gone through many of these files and made reference to many of the projects that are still ongoing in New Haven,” he says. “I was on this special committee for the Harp administration, that worked on the Long Wharf land. It was very helpful to go back to what was going on with the mall wars, long before Ikea even showed up. It was kind of cool to be on that committee. Kind of go back and look through these files at the same time, just this past year. And I actually discussed some of this for a couple conferences."
When asked about use of the collection in his classes at SCSU, Wharton mentioned his course Grassroots Democracy. He described it as “essentially looking at state and local politics government problems.” He has introduced students in this course to the DeStefano Collection, making sure that students with potential interest know that it exists and that Buley Library has made it available online. “We have a lot of students who are from New Haven,” he said. “I’ve had a couple who are intrigued by it. Nick [Alexiades] has actually been the conduit it for it. I’ve had a couple of his colleagues from the political science department where he’s helped them out with projects about what New Haven was like in the 90s. We’ve had some students do a paper too, on downtown projects that were supposed to supposed to appear in [the DeStefano papers], so Nick has definitely been in touch with a couple students on that too. So we try to pitch it to some of our majors if that’s possible."
By encouraging students to pursue research projects on local political history, Wharton hopes to inspire his students to take an active role in local politics and to realize that they have the power to enact change in their own communities. He told us, "They’re ready to take on Congress and the White House and I say, look at your own backyard. Or they’re ready to go to the UN.” Wharton would like to help students understand “that they could do something just as, if not more, effective locally.” He believes that guiding them to view these primary sources documenting New Haven’s past will help them to make this connection.
We spoke to one of Wharton’s students, Nick Alexiades, who is working on his honors departmental thesis with Wharton. When asked to describe his project, Alexiades said, "I’m examining the institutional infrastructure of the New Haven Public School District Reconstruction program, more commonly known as Citywide School Construction or Kid’s First School Construction. And that refers more broadly to the decision by Mayor DeStefano and the Board of Education to undergo the reconstruction policy following the publication of the New Haven Public School District Facilities Report.” He added, “I’m trying to understand the relationship between the school construction and reform as an ideology movement within the school systems.”
Alexiades has used a mix of library resources to research his project, supplementing library books with primary resources in the DeStefano Collection. "I’m using the books to provide that framework and make the case for construction as sort of an evolution of the city’s urban renewal plans and then I’m using the primary source to bolster as evidence in that case, while also using and trying to engage with some of the thoughts and concerns that were raised in a lot of school reform literature,” he told us.
He expressed appreciation for digital access to these papers provided by Buley Library and made possible by the work of librarian Jackie Toce and her colleagues. "The fact that I can go to the digital download and say I need a pdf and I can retrieve a pdf and have it on a computer for direct reference as I’m writing a thesis is beyond valuable,” said Alexiades. “I’ll typically go through the list of resources. I’ll identify a few boxes. Then I’ll typically come in [the DeStefano Room in Buley Library] to check the documents to see if it’s relevant, and then I will check the digital collection to see if it’s something that I can download and keep a copy of for immediate reference. So I like how the multi-faceted and multiplicity of platform is such a valuable tool in that way. Because it sure beats having the post it note of box 75, box 89, box 137 and shorthand titles. The digital collection has been very valuable for me in that way."
An interesting side note: as a lifetime New Haven resident, Alexiades was able to see some of his own family history documented in the DeStefano papers. "When I was a child,” he said, “And you can find the papers in here—one of the plans that was decided, during one of the site selection processes in the early 2000s, they chose the block that my family’s restaurant was situated on for the cooperative arts and humanities high school."
In addition to serving the research interests of those studying political science and local governments, the DeStefano collection offers wider relevance by providing the opportunity to encourage student engagement with primary resources. History professor “Jason Smith has brought his class in,” Jackie tells us. “They were looking at one specific thing, but we took a bunch of stuff out and showed them--this is what a primary resource is, this is why it’s a primary resource. They all got to page through [the mayoral papers].”
The nature of the collection has also opened the door to interdisciplinary collaborations. Buley Library occasionally employs interns in technical services to work with the DeStefano papers. Jackie tells us, “usually when we have interns we have library majors, but starting last year we had political science and history majors. It was different to have to think about, okay, this isn’t about library science. This is about history.”
Last year, the uploading portion of the project was put on hold as Buley transferred its digital collections from the ContentDM platform to Islandora. Jackie and her colleagues spent a year transitioning the digital collections into the new platform. This switch allowed us to include our collections in the Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA) which is maintained by UCONN and also ingested into the Digital Public Library of America.
On Buley’s site, all digital collections are listed under “About” and then “Southern Digital Collections.”
You can click “Mayor John DeStefano Jr. Papers” to view the collection.
Once you’ve opened the database, particular documents can be retrieved by searching keywords. “For example,” Jackie says, “I can search ‘Livable City.’ That was a big thing—the Livable City Initiative. This goes to all the pages, so there’s 60,000 [scanned] pages that have that [term] in there.” An advanced search feature is forthcoming.
After six years of inventorying boxes of papers, scanning, editing, writing metadata, and uploading, Jackie Toce and her colleagues at Buley Library have built a searchable online collection that is available to anyone interested in New Haven history. The importance of special collection accessibility has become even more apparent during the pandemic, where physical buildings were either closed or difficult to visit. The hard work of digitizing this collection means that this information is widely accessible to anyone with an internet connection from anywhere in the world.
The mayoral papers tell the story of John DeStefano’s time in office and his impact on New Haven, now preserved in the Buley digital collection for posterity, which we hope will inform and empower our students both in their education and in their efforts to improve their communities by taking active roles in local politics.
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Photos by Kari Swanson.
Interview content edited for clarity and brevity.
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