New Online Exhibit on African Americans at UNCG: A Collaboration between the University Libraries and Google

Starting today, over 200 records from UNCG's University Archives can be viewed online by people around the world due to a new partnership between the Google Cultural Institute and the UNCG University Libraries. Staff in the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives and the Libraries' Electronic Resources and Information Technologies departments uploaded the records and built the online exhibit "African Americans at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1892-1971."

Pete [last name unknown] and Ezekiel Robinson, early 1890s

This exhibit traces the history of African American faculty, staff, and students at UNCG, from its opening as the State Normal and Industrial School in 1892 until 1971. Through digitized photographs and documents as well as audio clips from oral history interviews conducted as part of the African American Institutional Memory Project, viewers can learn more about African American employees on campus prior to desegregation, Jim Crow-era debates over the use of facilities by African Americans, the fight to integrate the student body, student involvements in the sit ins and protest movements of the early 1960s, the founding of the Neo-Black Society in 1968, and the hiring of the first African American faculty members.

JoAnne Smart and Bettye Tillman, 1956

The Google Cultural Institute and its partners are putting the world’s cultural treasures at the fingertips of Internet users and are building tools that allow the cultural sector to share more of its diverse heritage online. The Google Cultural Institute has partnered with more than 1,000 institutions giving a platform to over 250,000 thousand artworks and a total of 6 million photos, videos, manuscripts and other documents of art, culture and history. You can learn more about the broader project in this article.

Students in the Neo-Black Society Lounge, 1971

If you have questions about the exhibit, please contact Erin Lawrimore, University Archivist, at scua@uncg.edu.

University Archives Completes Grant to Enhance Oral History Interview Access

University Archives recently completed work on a grant-funded project to provide enhanced access to many of our oral history interviews with African American students who attended Woman's College/UNCG in the 1960s. These oral history interviews, which are part of SCUA's African American Institutional Memory Project, were previously available online only as a PDF transcription. Even with this somewhat limited access, the interviews were frequently used by undergraduate students and others seeking to gain information on the personal experiences of students during this time.

This project, which was supported by the University Libraries' Innovation and Enrichment Grant Program, allowed us to augment access to a total of 27 of our oral history interviews -- two more than the initially-proposed 25. Using the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), developed by the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries, we indexed the interviews and created time syncs that make it easier to search and move between the written transcription and specific points in the audio recordings. We also established a workflow that will incorporate indexing and syncing via OHMS into the workflow for future University Archives' oral history projects.

For the first time, direct access to the audio recordings of these valuable interviews is available online. You can browse and listen to these enhanced interviews through the Libraries' digital collections portal.

Questions about the project may be directed to University Archivist Erin Lawrimore.

Enhancing Access to Oral History Interviews

Thanks to a 2014-2015 award through the University Libraries' Innovation and Program Enrichment Program, we are currently working on providing access to audio and enhanced transcripts for the oral history interviews conducted as part of our African American Institutional Memory Project.

These interviews with African American alumni from the 1960s and 1970s, which typically are an hour or more in length, provide in-depth information about an interviewee’s contributions to and viewpoint on their time at WC/UNCG. Often these interviews provide valuable personal insight into history in a way that the official university records cannot. Student researchers in particular find the oral history interviews interesting, as they present a perspective that is often more relatable to them.

Currently, access to these oral histories is provided primarily through the interview transcript (the word-for-word text of the interview). Audio recordings are available on CD if requested, but access to these recordings is not provided online. The transcripts are among the highest ranked downloads from across the University Libraries’ digital collections, yet the process of finding relevant information within the transcripts is often challenging due to their lengthy nature.

With the project funds, a second-year graduate student from the Department of History is working with us to use an open-source tool (the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer, developed by the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries) to enhance access to oral history audio recordings online and time-synch the audio recordings to existing transcripts. This will allow researchers to more readily search each oral history recording for relevant information and quickly skip to certain key topics discussed in the interview.

At the conclusion of the project in June 2015, it is anticipated that at least 25 enhanced oral history audio recordings and accompanying transcripts will be made available to researchers online. We also hope to build a web exhibit that highlights some of the key stories told in these interviews.

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October is Archives Month, an annual observance of the agencies and people responsible for maintaining and making available the archival and historical records of our nation, state, communities and people. As part of the month-long celebration, this blog is highlighting some of the innovative and exciting work being done in Special Collections and University Archives.