Funded Projects Query Form
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Implementation of robust systems for preserving and accessing a longstanding digital resource on the history of African and Afro-descended people. The project would also conduct outreach to scholarly communities, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and the general public to encourage further awareness and use of these collections.

In 2002 the Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies Digital Archive was launched with NEH support. Since that time international teams of historians trained in languages and paleography, IT specialists, bibliographer and archivists have collaborated to preserve over 400,000 unique images dating from the 16th-19th centuries, documenting the history of four to six million African and Afro-descended individuals. Having outgrown our dated technology and platform, we seek support to revitalize this archive, transfer these data to SOBEK and create metadata and transcriptions that will enhance both use and long-term preservation. At project’s end, we will also host an international conference of our collaborative network of digital humanities scholars and a post-conference workshop to share digital preservation expertise with institutions in the region that have limited cyberinfrastructure.