An academic conference was held recently at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library on the campus of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, for scholars who are working to preserve the historical records of slavery. The scholars, who work on digital preservation projects in Cuba, Brazil, Sierra Leone, Colombia, Haiti, and the United States, gathered to discuss strategies and methods for preserving records pertaining to slavery and making them available to researchers and the general public.
Jane Landers, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History and director of the Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies Digital Archive at Vanderbilt, stated that “it’s always been the belief that the history was stolen or the history wasn’t kept. In fact, these generations of enslaved people are not completely voiceless if we save and translate these records.”
