This is part of the Jacksonville Main Library’s African American History Collection. | Dan Scanlan, WJCT News 89.9
Published on January 10, 2024 at 2:54 pm
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A $1 million grant will enable the Jacksonville Public Library to digitize more of the history of Jacksonville’s Black community and share it and other documents with other libraries and researchers.
The grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, announced Wednesday, is the largest private donation in the library’s history. It will be used to expand the library’s Memory Lab and African American History Collection, officials said.
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Library Director Tim Rogers said the grant will build on successes the library has already had with its Memory Lab, where patrons convert books and other media into digital formats for personal and library use.
“More people will be able to share in this creation of future history,” Rogers said. “It will also enable the library to add these individual stories to our historical collections so that they can be accessed and preserved for posterity.”
Along with adding more memory stations, two staffers will be hired for the library’s Special Collections team. The African American History Collection, which contains more than 1,000 documents and artifacts, will be expanded with more recordings of oral histories and the digitizing of more Black newspapers, church directories and other community materials.
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“We have some of the church directories in our collection already, and we will be reaching out asking for permission to digitize them and put them online, and then we will also be reaching out to other churches who we don’t have their materials in our collection,” said Laura Minor, the library’s special collections manager. “We are very excited about it.”
The 54-year-old Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities, believing that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding, according to its website. The New York City-based foundation provides grants to art and culture programs, colleges and universities, museums and other institutions as well as universities and libraries to increase access to knowledge, the website states.
The Mellon grant will expand on an original federal grant that established 13 Memory Reader stations, now set up on the fourth floor of the Main Library. There, patrons can edit and restore photos, slides, film and documents as well as convert old VHS videotapes, audio cassettes and vinyl records and film to digital format.
“How can we make this a history project and not just a personal project,?” Rogers said. “With this grant, we are actually enhancing and expanding that.”
That includes supporting deeper development of the library’s African American History Collection, enabling it to serve as a research site for local and regional scholars and students, library officials said. The library system would also be able to sign up for access to ProQuest’s Historical Black Newspapers database and its collection of articles, obituaries, photos and more for the study of the history of race relations, journalism and local and national politics, Rogers said.
The collection will now also collaborate with historical groups, Edward Waters University and others to form partnerships to encourage their members to “join in this idea of purposeful digitization” of this historical documents and images, Rogers said.
Rogers said the original idea was to let patrons “digitize their memories” and contribute those back to the community. But the Mellon grant allows them to make that and new information more widely accessible to researchers, educators and historians.
Mayor Donna Deegan called it “truly transformational” as she announced it, hoping what it provides will entice more people to use the library.
“I would also like to thank the Mellon Foundation for making such a tremendous investment in Jacksonville. It says a lot about what all of you are doing on a daily basis,” she said, looking at library and foundation officials in the audience.
“I cannot wait to see what will be added to this (African American) collection,” she said. “It is more important than ever for us to understand our shared history, unite our city and make sure that we are seeing each other’s humanity fully.”
Along with adding more staff and memory lab sites, Rogers said the grant will allow Jacksonville’s library system to join the Digital Public Library of America, which pulls in digital collections from across the country. That will make Jacksonville’s digital book, photo and information collections accessible online by libraries around the world, he said.
