First and foremost, The HistoryMakers is an archive. The organization’s relationship with the library and archival community has been a long one, and the advisement and support of the community has been essential to the organization’s growth. As an oral history collections, The HistoryMakers works directly with librarians and library staff at each of its subscribing institutions to serve as a resource for instruction and primary source research. In addition, The HistoryMakers seeks partnership with subscribing libraries, so that the resource not only is used and consulted, but so subscribers can diversify their collections, lost and forgotten collections can be brought to light, and critical contextual evidence for the stories told in The HistoryMakers Digital Archive are identified and made accessible.
In working with college and university libraries, The HistoryMakers provides:
Members of The HistoryMakers Library & Archives Committee are made up of librarians, archivists, and library administrators at each of The HistoryMakers partner institutions. Rather than serving solely as a database for partner institutions, The HistoryMakers also seeks to facilitate connections that will enrich the physical collections of partner libraries, as well as exploring mechanisms for connecting The HistoryMakers oral history interviews with other oral history collections or supporting contextual materials.
Projects of the Library & Archives Committee have included working with The HistoryMakers on the re-institution of a training program for minority archivists at Yale University, Harvard University, and Emory University; facilitating the donation of the personal papers of HistoryMakers like Angela Davis (Schlesinger Library), Daphne Maxwell Reid (Northwestern University), and Senator Emil Jones (University of Illinois, Chicago) to institutional repositories for preservation.
Brandeis University
Matthew Sheehy; University Librarian
Carnegie Mellon University
Erica Linke; Associate Dean & Director of Collections and Information Access
Columbia University
John Tofanelli; Research Collections and Services Librarian, Humanities/History
Cornell University
Eric Acree; Director, John Henrik Clarke Africana Library
Emory University
Yolanda Cooper; University Librarian
Harvard University
Marilyn Dunn; Executive Director of the Schlesinger Library and Librarian of the Radcliffe Institute
Johnson C. Smith University
Monika Rhue; Director of Library Services and Curation
Northwestern University
Kathleen Bethel; African American Studies Librarian
Charla Wilson; Archivist for the Black Experience
Princeton University
Steven Knowlton; Librarian for History and African American Studies
Rutgers University
Consuella Askew; Director, Dana Library
University of Arkansas
Carolyn H. Allen; Dean of Libraries
University of Chicago
Brenda Johnson; University Librarian
University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
Harriett Green; Head of Scholarly Communication and Publishing; Scholarly Communication and Publishing Librarian, Associate Professor
University of Iowa
Dan Johnson; Consulting Archivist
University of Pennsylvania
Nicholas Okrent; Coordinating Bibliographer and Librarian for the Humanities, Bibliographer and Liaison for World History and Humanities
University of Virginia
Sony Prosper; Resident Librarian; Special Collections
Virginia Commonwealth University
John Ulmschneider; University Librarian
We work with educational institutions around the country. And the list is growing. Contact us to learn how to partner with The History Makers and integrate our Digital Archive into your University or Library. Join our community today.
John O'Connor, Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room Manager at Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, created a detailed virtual walking tour of locations in and around Charlotte, North Carolina mentioned in The HistoryMakers Digital Archive.
Beyond simply providing support and access to The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, the organization has also matched several institutions with African American alumni they had lost touch with, in an effort to have their personal papers and collections preserved. Though The HistoryMakers does not deal in material collections, the photos, letters, essays, articles, flyers, and ephemera found in these collections provide essential context and support evidence for the lived testimony of those interviewed for The HistoryMakers Collection.
Unfortunately, just as the 20th century passed with very little documentation of African America life, history, and culture in the oral medium, the same is true for archival collections. More than 90% of those interviewed for The HistoryMakers Collection would never write an autobiography – or have a biography written on them – but the percentage of those who have made decisions regarding where and how their personal collections will be saved is even greater. The HistoryMakers looks to its university archive partners to help in reversing this trend.
At Dominican University, instruction and outreach librarian Elizabeth Lang built an outstanding module for Dominican’s students and faculty to visit when interested in integrating The HistoryMakers Digital Archive in the classroom. Lang provides instructions on the functionality and feature set of the resource, but also gives users a glimpse at the databases value as a source for research and instruction.
