Understanding the Sustainability of the HBCU-CUL Digitization Initiative

• In Event: Preserving Hallowed Grounds: Digital Publications as 21st Century Sites for African American Memories

Abstract

This paper examines the value of digitization projects at HBCU’s and other historically Black institutions. It is primarily concerned with initiatives intended to bridge the digital divide and their importance for the preservation of materials that document the Black experience. The paper will focus on two collaborative projects, the HBCU-CUL Digitization Initiative and the DC Africana Archives Project (DCAAP). Both provide research access to important collections for Black Studies scholars by creating centralized web databases. The HBCU-CUL Digitization Initiative was an Andrew W. Mellon grant-funded project facilitated by Cornell University Library from 2005 to 2011. Led by Cornell Librarian Ira Revels, the effort found various degrees of success meeting three major goals: digitizing mainly photographic archives at HBCUs, providing web access to these archives, and making for sustainability of the project’s accomplishments and continued digitization efforts after Mellon funding ended. The DCAAP is a partnership between the Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, District of Columbia Archives, the Historical Society of Washington, D.C, the National Museium of American History’s Archives Center, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library and George Washington University’s Special Collections Research Center and Africana Studies Program. The project provides research access to Washingtonniana collections from six institutions, while integrating the digital materials into academic programs. Given the recent major intersections of digitization and the African American experience, including Mellon-funded Publishing Without Walls project (PWW), understanding HBCU-CUL’s and DCAAP’s successes and shortcomings may be crucial to the success of current and future digitization efforts.

Author

• Joshua Daniel Lynch, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign