HBCU Digital Library Trust Project
The mission of the HBCU Digital Library Trust is building capacity with Historically Black Colleges and Universities to digitally preserve and provide global access to their archival collections, sustain institutional, cultural, and community memory, and ensure stories are discovered, maintained, remembered and told. The AUC Woodruff Library serves as the digital repository host and digitization hub for the project.
Passing It Forward Oral History Interviews Project
Collaborating with Spelman College Archives and the City University of New York (CUNY), the AUC Woodruff Library provides online access to oral history interviews from LGBTQ+ elders of color in our RADAR institutional repository. Through their own voices and images, the Passing It Forward project links the personal stories of LGBTQ+ elders of color – those above 50 years and older- to the political and social movements in which they are connected. These intergenerational conversations allow this growing and important population to reflect on their life and wisdom. The collection consists of 150 interviews conducted by college-aged interviewers over the course of two years in 2020-2021. Each interview includes a video file with closed captioning and a transcript that can be downloaded.
The oral history project was coordinated by Dr. Juan Battle, Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York. Dr. Battle donated the collection to the Spelman College Archives because he wanted it to reside in an HBCU with a robust gender and sexuality studies program. A team is working on making all 150 recordings accessible along with developing curriculum and resources designed to complement the collection.
Robert F. Smith Internships funded by the National Museum of African American History and Culture
Three college interns spent 12 weeks at the AUC during the summers of 2022, 2023, and 2024 where they gained hands-on experience working with archival collections digitization. Students selected materials appropriate for digitization from the Voter Education Project collection, prepared and digitized items on the appropriate scanner, created descriptive metadata and ingested images and metadata into the Library’s digital repository for access.
Joseph Echols and Evelyn Gibson Lowery Collection processing and digitization project
In 2021, the family of late civil rights icons Joseph and Evelyn Lowery gifted a priceless collection of official and personal papers, photographs, documents, writings, speeches, notes, travel diaries, and other mementos to Morehouse College. The Lowery Collection includes over 200 linear feet of invaluable materials chronicling the Lowerys’ work with civil and human rights leaders and is housed at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library.
In August 2021, a team of three archivists and two digital experts were hired at the AUC Woodruff Library to organize, preserve, describe, and digitize The Joseph Echols and Evelyn Gibson Lowery Collection with the goal of making the collection broadly accessible both physically and digitally to the public. In just 18 months the team processed the entire collection and digitized 26,386 pages and 1,367 audio visual assets.
Lowery Collection Promotional Video
GaNCH: Mapping Georgia's Natural Cultural and Historic Organizations for Disaster Response
In June 2019, the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library received a LYRASIS Catalyst Fund grant to support the creation of a publicly editable directory of Georgia’s Natural, Cultural and Historical Organizations (NCHs), allowing for quick retrieval of location and contact information for disaster response. By the end of the project, over 1,900 entries for NCH organizations in Georgia were compiled, updated, and uploaded to Wikidata, the linked open data database from the Wikimedia Foundation. These entries included directory contact information and GIS coordinates that appear on a map presented on the GaNCH project website allowing emergency responders to quickly search for NCHs by region and county in the event of a disaster. The database is used regularly by the Georgia Heritage Responders and others to send out resources before a storm and to follow up on damages after disaster strikes.
Our Story: Photographs and Publications of the Atlanta University Center
Our Story was a two and a half-year (2017-2019) collaborative grant funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Preservation and Access. The project was a collaboration between the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, Spelman College Archives, and the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG). Through digital reformatting and a portal of publicly accessible collections on the AUC Woodruff Library’s repository and the DLG, this project expanded access to unique publications, periodicals, theses, dissertations and photographs documenting the history of the AUC – the largest consortium of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. After completion, archives related to the following schools is discoverable throughout the world for scholarship about various aspects of African American higher education directly after emancipation of slavery through to the 21st Century: Atlanta University, Clark College, Clark Atlanta University, Gammon Theological Seminary, Interdenominational Theological Center, Morehouse College, Morris Brown College, and Spelman College.
Spreading the Word: Expanding Access to African American Religious Archival Collections at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library
Spreading the Word, a three year project that ran from 2015-2017 funded by a grant from the National Endowment for Humanities, was a collaboration between the Archives Research Center and Digital Services at the AUC Robert W. Woodruff Library. The project prepared for access fourteen collections of rare materials on African American religion spanning from the late 19th century to early 20th century, and from the 1950s to 2000s. Digitization and online access to 4,700 audio and visual materials previously underutilized or inaccessible is a major component of this project. The digitized collections are available for access on the AUC Woodruff Library's RADAR repository.