Awarded with a $12,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and in partnership with the Common Heritage Program, the Ina Dillard Russell Library took on an initiative to document and preserve the overlooked history of Milledgeville’s African American community. The project aimed to encourage citizens to preserve their history by digitizing historical documents such as papers and pictures.
The Russell Library conducted a community workshop on preserving family records, with Shanee’ Murrain, MLS, M.Div., Digital Developer and Community Builder at the Digital Public Library of America, providing instruction on best practices for care of photographs, newsletters, scrapbooks, programs, videos, and textiles and discussed the considerations for administering community archives, such as those found in churches.
Additionally, two History Harvest days were conducted by Russell Library, collecting materials from the community at the Harrisburg Community Center, as well as El Bethel Baptist Church in Milledgeville. Participants received a flash drive containing digital preservation files of their historic documents. Once the materials were digitized, community members were given the option to share their digitized materials by adding them to collections like Special Collections at Georgia College, as well as larger archives, such as the Digital Library of Georgia and the Digital Public Library of America.
The resulting traveling/digital exhibit was curated by Evan Leavitt, Ina Dillard Russell Library.
Common Heritage traveling/digital exhibit reflects on how the African American community has made change. Throughout the twentieth century, African American women and men gained incremental advances that collectively would transform the race’s agency, the self-determination to act independently and make their own free choices. African Americans, by creating their own organizations and institutions, developed ways to address their needs and aspirations that fostered the values of community, service, and mutual support.
At the center of this community were African American women. Whether engaged in professional or domestic work, or operating simply as members of working-class families aspiring for middle-class status, women played essential roles in the community-building process. African American women structured community life around a core of essential institutions: families, churches, education, clubs, hospitals, and health clinics, from which manifested the potential of social service reform activism. Recognizing these important communities is central to understanding the multiple and important roles of African Americans in the American story. These are stories of perseverance, resourcefulness, and resilience.
African American narratives are sorely lacking and often misrepresented in the archival record. The archive is a traditionally privileged space that reinforces the hierarchical structures of society through its power to determine what is worthy of preservation and what is not. This power influences societal conceptions of identity and belonging. This privileging creates a cacophony of silenced voices that directly contributes to the marginalization of communities. Given the historical exclusion of narratives, there exists a need to address this silencing.
Georgia College’s Russell Library, awarded with the Common Heritage Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to capture the underrepresented history of the Milledgeville African American community, seized the opportunity to acknowledge and redress the lack of diversity in our institutional holdings. This undertaking is imperative to ensure our collections reflect the diversity of our shared community. We thank the African American community for their partnership in this endeavor to reconstruct a more accurate understanding of the past.
Public digitization events are part of an emerging phenomenon that archival theorists refer to as participatory archiving. At these events--commonly called “scanning days” or “digitization days”--individuals connected with a theme, topic, event, or community come together to share personal and family photographs and stories to have them copied and then added to a digital collection.
Participatory archive projects are community-based, but distinct from community archives which are created and maintained independently outside of a traditional and institutionally based archive. With participatory archiving, professional archivists and librarians mediate and facilitate a process for community members to play active roles in selecting and describing photographs, documents, objects, or other items to be preserved in a collection and made accessible by an established institutional repository. (ROPA)
To learn more visit Road Map For Participatory Archiving
The Common Heritage traveling exhibit is available for remote exhibition. The exhibit consists of an Introductory panel (8'x8') and five pop-up panels (4'x6.5'). If interested in requesting the exhibit for display at your venue, please contact Special Collections at scinfo@gcsu.libanswers.com or call 478-445-0988.
A Black Women's History of the United States by 
Black Lives, American Love by 
Vanguard by 
A Forgotten Sisterhood by 
Fugitive Pedagogy by 
Black Folk by 
Black Joy by 
American Patriots by 
Half American by 
Courage Has No Color, the True Story of the Triple Nickles by 