For decades, white institutions and a handful of historically Black
college and university (HBCU) archives have served as the main
repositories for document and artifacts that tell the story of the
history and contributions of people of African descent. But countless
other pieces of Black America’s historical fabric are collecting dust
in church basements or crumbling on bookshelves.
That situation could soon change.
Fisk University, along with a coalition of Black institutions and
international organizations, is gearing up to retrieve, preserve and
distribute the historical and intellectual properties of African
Americans, Organizers of the effort, known as the HOLDINGS Projects
(Holding Our Library Documents Insures Nobility, Greatness and
Strength), envision the formation of a single repository of historical
information documenting the African American experience.
HOLDINGS is an outgrowth of the newly revived Race Relations
Institute at Fisk. Urban City Foods, Burger King, the La-Van and Wendy
Hawkins Foundation, the National Council for Blacks Studies, the
National Council of Negro Women, and other soon-to-be name HBCUs are
initial partners in the preservation project. While Fisk will be the
central repository, collection and preservation sites will be housed at
HBCUs and Black organizations in: Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles; Tulsa,
Oklahoma; Chicago; Washington, D.C.; Nashville, Tennessee; Atlanta;
Tallahassee, Florida; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Accra, Ghana.
At Fisk, the high-tech preservation project will, for the
first-time, restore the pages of the worn, fragile Bible given to
Abraham Lincoln by slaves upon their release. It will also provide a
road map for scholars tracking the emergence of African American women
into politics. And it will rescue endangered Black historical
collections from further extinctions.
The HOLDINGS project will include scanning microfilm copies of
books as well as original works. It will store them is digital form so
that they can be distributed — via the Internet — to the nation and
around the world. Modeled after “Project Open book,” a similar document
preservation effort at Yale University, HOLDINGS will also make it
possible for books to be reprinted on high-quality printing systems.
Beginning this summer, the Encyclopedia Africana Project (EAP) in
Accra, Ghana, is expected to transform nearly ten million words in
several history volumes into electronic reading material using
digital-imaging technology. EAP is considered the last major project of
Fisk’s most celebrated graduate, W.E.B. DuBois.
