The University of Minnesota is embarking on a two-year project to digitize all of the materials in the university’s collections relating to African American history and culture. The collections include nearly a half million pages of documents as well as photographs and videos. The materials range from the sixteenth century to the present.
The project is funded in part by a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources. Cecily Marcus, co-director of the project, noted that “by identifying and making discoverable online the impact of African Americans in every aspect of American life, this project makes an argument about history and how we tell it. The significant presence of materials documenting African American life shows us that there is no American history without African American history.”
Once the digitization process is complete, the collections will be made available online through a number of different web portals.
