Preserving the past to enhance future occupational therapy practice

It all started with a phone call about a document scanner. It led to a collaboration that will help preserve the origins of Western Michigan University’s occupational therapy program and improve access to historical records and information on psycho-social treatments used for mental health care.

Dr. Ann Chapleau, professor of occupational therapy, is conducting a multi-year project on mental health outcomes before the introduction of psychotropic medication in 1955. Before medications, treatments were centered on daily engagement in activities (occupations) and sensory treatments like massage and hydrotherapy.

Western’s occupational therapy program started at the Kalamazoo State Hospital in 1922, and students continued to attend classes at the hospital for the first 22 years of the program.

“My study really revolves around occupational therapy as it was in the beginning: provided solely in asylums,” says Chapleau. “We started out recording [interviews with] people who are quite advanced in their age now. They were recalling what it was like to be an occupational therapy student back in the 1950s before Thorazine. Before medication was available for psychiatry.”

Her work involved digitizing thousands of records to create a data set for analysis and acquiring artifacts for an archival exhibit, including books, papers and pamphlets produced by occupational therapists and former employees at the Kalamazoo State Hospital.

She encountered an unexpected roadblock to her work: limited access to high-quality scanning equipment. After discovering the limited equipment available on campus, she reached out to Amy Bocko, digital projects librarian, for advice. Their collaboration quickly expanded from equipment for researchers to the possibility of increasing access to the work through a digital archive.

Chapleau and Bocko started by securing grant funding to create a portable document scanning kit for onsite research that could be checked out from the University Libraries. Bocko also created an additional kit to capture oral histories. Chapleau’s project is the first to use these resources and has been instrumental in their development.

Bocko noted that it offered the opportunity to test the instruction guides and equipment so it was ready for other researchers to use. 

“It’s been mutually beneficial,” says Bocko. “Even just thinking of different ways to use tools for field research that anybody can use across the University.”

Bocko and Chapleau’s collaboration deepened as the research team began collecting oral history interviews.

“That’s when I came knocking on Amy’s door,” says Chapleau. “Amy had all of the ideas and knowledge about what we do with these [interviews]. Where do we put them? How do we create this?”

Bocko used her expertise in tools like Scaler, a free authoring platform for digital scholarship, and ScholarWorks, Western’s institutional repository, to help Chapleau preserve the recordings and make them accessible.

Chapleau’s physical archival exhibit was presented at the occupational therapy department’s 100-year gala and featured Chapleau’s work, artifacts, devices and tools used by occupational therapists in the early days. Additional oral history interviews were collected during the event.

While work on the archive continues to evolve, Chapleau and Bocko remarked that the collaboration was surprising as scholars in digital humanities and healthcare disciplines don’t often have a chance to work together.

“In our college, we talk about interprofessional collaboration, and it’s always about health care, like working with PTs and nursing,” says Chapleau. “So this is broadening our horizons.”

“This is definitely a first for me. I mostly work with a lot of archives in the humanities,” says Bocko. “It was great to see what I would think of as digital humanities tools be integrated with occupational therapy research.”

“The secret sauce to me is about having the right people together,” says Chapleau. “When you go out and knock on doors to meet people and ask if they’d be willing to give up their valuable time to help. Of course, I lucked out big time with Amy.”

“I think at the core of what I do is help people make their research shine and find new ways to convey it and make dynamic digital projects,” says Bocko. “I love that I get to dip my toe in so many different projects. I think that’s the nature of being a librarian—you know a little bit about a lot of things.”