By Joan Naturale
Rochester, New York, is home to a sizable Deaf community that can be attributed in large
part to the 1968 establishment of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), a college of
the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Although NTID focuses on technical career training, the
creative signing arts have flourished, including American Sign Language (ASL) Literature and
Poetry. NTID had a leading role, hosting national conferences on ASL literature attended by Deaf
and hearing scholars, students, interpreters, and the public. Recognition of the scholarly and artistic
value of the work gained momentum through these conferences. The Deaf Studies Archive has ASL
poetry and literature 'hidden' collections done through the video recordings of this evolving history
and movement, which showcases ASL literary performers.
The timing could not be better for us at the Deaf Studies Archive at RIT Libraries to take
action in preserving and documenting the Deaf community's heritage and culture. The ASL poetry
and literature video collections at NTID is simply too valuable to be left alone on shelves
accumulating dust. We explored digital collections and discovered the Council on Library and
Information Resources (CLIR) organization that provides grants promoting hidden digital collections.
We went ahead and applied for a CLIR grant and won funding in 2017 to digitize the ASL Poetry and
Literature rare video collections, make them accessible to the internet public and support the Deaf
Studies curricula. The captioned and voiced videos include synopses (created by Karen Christie,
ASL literature scholar and retired professor of NTID) and transcripts, enabling viewers to turn on/off
the captions and voice. The purpose of adding accessibility features was to expose a broader
audience to the works and promote universal design. The YouTube portal is available and can be
viewed.
Important developments were occurring over time that contributed to NTID's possession of
such large video collections on ASL poetry and literature. In the 1960s, William Stokoe published
now-seminal works on ASL linguistics in which he established ASL as a language. These works
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The Power of ASL 11
Summer 2020 – Issue 18