The W.E.B. Du Bois Library at the
The library is able to finance this project thanks to a $200,000 grant UMass’ library received from the Verizon Foundation, a philanthropic arm of Verizon Communications,
The digitization will make available for the first time online the original diaries, letters, photographs and other materials related to the prominent African-American figure.
Du Bois wrote more than 4,000 articles, essays and books, most of which are currently out-of-print or difficult to find.
Robert Cox, the director of special collections at the library who has worked there since November 2004, said the project will provide the public with extraordinary access to Du Bois’ papers. He said the project is slated to start in July and will take approximately two years to finish.
‘ ‘If you go and put [the items] online, researchers anywhere at any time can get access to the material. They can read it at three in the morning in Zimbabwe and do whatever they want,’ said Cox. ‘But they can also gain the ability to search through the collection by keywords and things like that, which is much, much harder to do now.’
Cox said the materials consist of typed and handwritten documents, both of which require different scanning and cataloging processes. He said typed materials will be put through optical character recognition, or OCR, in which a computer scans the text and makes it visible to a reader. For the handwritten documents and some of the typed ones that will not go through OCR with much efficiency or accuracy, workers for special collections will have to describe each item with notes.
‘ ‘It is a very labor-intensive process, where we say, ‘This is who wrote the letter,’ ‘This is who received the letter,’ ‘This is where it was written,” Cox said, adding that they will also include some basic content information.
‘ ‘If someone was interested in the Pan-African Congresses, they can go through and do a search across the whole collection and find any letter that we thought mentioned something about the Pan-African Congresses,’ he said.
The Pan-African Congresses were a series of five meetings that were intended to address issues that Africa faced due to European colonization.
Cox said those handling the materials must be very careful because the paper used by Du Bois and others at that time was very acidic and can be easily damaged.
All the items will be slightly affected by the light and heat of the scanning process but the damage shouldn’t be significant, he said.
According to a statement, once the materials are scanned and catalogued, the library will work with Verizon to identify each document to include on Thinkfinity.org, the Verizon Foundation’s free educational website that provides resources to increase teacher effectiveness and improve student achievement.
The statement said the Verizon Foundation works to support the advancement of literacy and K-12 education through Thinkfinity.org, which is produced in partnership with 11 of the country’s leading educational organizations.
‘ ‘The Verizon Foundation has long been a supporter of organizations that use technology in a learning environment. And this is a perfect example of how the technology and the need for further research for significant Americans come together,’ said Verizon spokesman Philip Santoro. ‘We see this as a perfect blend of education and technology coming together for a terrific purpose.’
Santoro said Verizon is providing the funds required to digitize the Du Bois material and will assist in ensuring that all of the project’s technological needs are met.
‘ ‘At this point, it’s really just starting to get off the ground now,’ he said. ‘We’ve offered our assistance. It remains to be seen to what extent our employees will be involved, but we’re there to help if help is required.’
Since 1973, the library has housed the W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, a collection of more than 100,000 letters, photographs and manuscripts of published and unpublished writings, as well as memorabilia and audiovisual materials that have to do with Du Bois. The library boasts one of the top three collections in the country for studying African-American history.
Included in the materials are Du Bois’ letters to and from U.S. presidents and public figures such as Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, Albert Einstein and Mohandas Gandhi, as well as a handwritten copy of his best known book, ‘The Souls of Black Folk,’ w
hich was published in 1903.
According to the statement, another valuable item within the collection is a menu that was signed by those at the first meeting of the Niagara Movement, the predecessor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Because no restaurant in Buffalo, N.Y, would serve the black leaders, they held their first meeting across the river in Ontario, the statement said.
Cox said the collection’s contents are used by students, faculty, visiting scholars and other researchers from around the world.
‘ ‘Du Bois was a great intellectual and a great activist,’ Cox said. ‘He took things that he understood from his academic work and applied it to real-life situations and to improving the real lives of individuals in American society.’
Randolph Bromery, the chancellor of UMass from 1971-79, led the effort to acquire the materials from Du Bois’ widow, Shirley Graham Du Bois.
The UMass Board of Trustees named the library after Du Bois in October 1994. The official dedication was in February 1996.
In a statement, UMass Chancellor Robert Holub said, ‘This project provides an excellent example of how the Commonwealth’s
During his 95-year life ‘mdash; from his birth in Great Barrington, Mass., in 1868 to his 1963 death in the African nation of Ghana, where he had become a naturalized citizen’mdash;Du Bois’ r’eacute;sum’eacute; included work as a journalist, scholar, author, social activist and one of the founding members of NAACP.
Domenic Poli can be reached at [email protected].