About Us
Courtesy of North Carolina Central University Archives
Mission
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.
Advisory Committee
Jerome Offord, Jr. (Chair)
Harvard Library
DeLisa Minor Harris
Fisk University
Jelani Favors
North Carolina A&T State University
Clarissa Myrick-Harris
Morehouse College
Jennifer Ferretti
Digital Library Federation
Adrienne Webber
Grambling State University
HBCU Library Alliance
Janice Franklin
Alabama State University
Doretha Williams
Smithsonian Institute, National Museum of African American History and Culture
Gary Kremer
State Historical Society of Missouri
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Vision
With trust at the forefront, we acknowledge and celebrate the undeniable lived experiences and legacy of Black people by being the preeminent digital repository network of HBCU archival collections.
History
In 2006, the HBCU Library Alliance and Cornell University Library collaborated on an innovative, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant-funded initiative to prepare library staff from Historically Black Colleges and Universities to produce digital collections, and develop an Internet-based, searchable database of HBCU library materials. The initiative became one of the first in the nation to build a national framework for digitization of collaborative HBCU library cultural heritage materials. Since 2008, the HBCU Digital Collection platform has been hosted by the Atlanta University Center (AUC) Robert W. Woodruff Library, and is heavily utilized for research, new scholarship, teaching and learning.*
With a shared goal to deepen capacity and advance open, public access to African American archives and special collections, the HBCU Library Alliance and Harvard Library began partnering in 2023. With funds provided by the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, they developed the HBCU Digital Library Trust to expand existing services and business models to scale up and strengthen capacity for the digitization, discovery, and preservation of more HBCU collections. In addition to hosting the digital collection platform, the AUC Woodruff Library provides robust services for contributing HBCUs as a Digitization Hub.
*Adapted from the HBCU Library Alliance –
Cornell University Library Digitization Initiative website.
