Cards no longer needed for library visits

This rare photo of composer and conductor William Levi Dawson is one of thousands of items available in Woodruff Library's digital archives.

The term research once envoked images of long nights in libraries sifting through archived materials, time-consuming drives to institutions that may or may not have relevant information, and many dead ends. However, technology has given scholars new hopes of more effective research methods, and the Robert W. Woodruff Library is making great strides in banishing any trepidation from research.

Since its creation in 2001, the Woodruff Library’s MetaScholar Initiative has been at the forefront of digital librarianship, developing digital tools and services that support scholarship and actively engaging in efforts to preserve digital resources. Focusing primarily on cultures and histories of the South, these programs have used emerging technologies to improve awareness of and access to collections in numerous southern archives at multiple institutions.

A major goal of the MetaScholar Initiative is to create better ways to share resources that take full advantage of new media to assist in communication among scholars, librarians, and archivists. To researchers, this means shorter nights, less sifting, and no wasted hours traveling down dead-end roads.

The MetaScholar Initiative encompasses more than a dozen digital library projects. Two of them are highlighted here. For more information or to access the initiative’s digital resources, visit www.metascholar.org.

Digitizing Dawson
One of the digital archives features the life and work of African American educator, composer and conductor, William Levi Dawson, whose papers are housed in the Woodruff Library’s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (MARBL).

Throughout his life, Dawson worked to educate audiences with the music of his childhood through both the arrangement and performance of various spirituals and through his Negro Folk Symphony. By placing African American folk music into a new context, Dawson transformed the songs’ racial oppression into a message of black resilience, legitimizing and reshaping the perception of African American culture.

Highlighting a rich collection of materials donated to MARBL, ranging from letters and books to film and radio broadcasts, the online presentation provides an interactive guide to digital reproductions from the Dawson collection. An accompanying online database provides scholars a guide to the complete archive. The online exhibition and database are expected to be available in January 2007.

Trans-Atlantic Slave Voyages Data to Go Online
A renowned database of slave trade voyages—fully 82 percent of the entire history of the slave trade—is being revised, expanded, and made available for free on the Internet for the first time. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has designated this project a “We the People” grant—an honor that singles out projects of great significance to the understanding of American history.

The expansion of the current database is based on the seminal 1999 work The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, a CD-ROM that includes more than 27,000 slave trade voyages, which has been popular with scholars and genealogists alike.

“We’re trying to do for African Americans what's been done for Euro-Americans already,” said David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History, and one of the scholars who published The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Eltis and Martin Halbert, director of digital programs and systems for Emory’s Libraries, are co-directing the project.

“Everyone wants to know where their antecedents came from, and certainly Europeans have been more thoroughly covered by historians,” Eltis said. “What the database makes possible is the establishment of links between America and Africa in a way that already has been done by historians on Europeans for many years.”

The expanded database making its debut on the Internet will include auxiliary materials such as maps, ship logs, and manifests. It also will be presented in a two-tier format: one for professional researchers, and another for K-12 students and general audiences.—Nancy Books