Thursday's panel will feature Lou Hood, former GLO Center director; reporter, Greta Cross; and Missouri State University archivist, Tracie Gieselman France.
"The collection is so expansive, it’s hard to figure out what to limit a presentation to," said Gieselman France. "What images do I pick and not keep people there for three hours?"
OLGA was established in 2003 by Drs. Holly Baggett and Ralph Smith, alongside several library employees and student organizations. Debates over a proposed sexual orientation nondiscrimination policy had been going on at the university since before the 90s. The Student Government Association and the faculty senate had passed resolutions of support by 1991, and the professors saw a need to document the process. The policy wouldn't be updated until 2006.
Over time, the archives grew to encompass queer history more broadly, and community groups started donating newspapers, photos, old flyers and other ephemera. Like everything in Special Collections, the materials in OLGA are preserved in a temperature and humidity-controlled environment, with lignin and acid-free cardboard.
Today, the collection is more than 50 boxes, so it’s broken up into numerous sub-collections for ease of organization. There’s a Black Tie collection, a collection of old drag photos, a GLO Center collection, one dedicated to activist and entrepreneur Jim House and of course the original nondiscrimination policy collection — the first box Geiselman France showed me when I visited.
"This one box is like, just that?"
"Yeah. Just that."
In fact, there were several boxes dedicated to the university policy debates. The archives contain vintage t-shirts, neon-colored posters printed at Kinko's, Normal Heart playbills and Black Tie invites.
Gieselman France stressed to me that OLGA is open to everyone — both viewing and donating. If you have an old zine, they’ll take that, but there’s also an oral history project, if you have a story to tell.
"We want people to consider [that] it’s not the people that you read about in your textbooks," she said, "it’s the everyday history that we are creating right now."
Because some materials have a number of duplicates, Gieselman France will be bringing some pieces to the program for attendees to flip through (though not without supervision, she noted). For more information, visit the thelibrary.org/preserve.