The George Washington University has received a 33-month grant totaling almost $496,000 from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to establish the D.C. Africana Archives Project (DCAAP) at Gelman Library. The DCAAP will document African American and African diaspora culture, history and politics in the District of Columbia.
The grant was awarded to the Special Collections Research Center at the GW Libraries and the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences’ Africana Studies Program and will enable them to combine their collections with those of other organizations and archives in the region.
The project will improve cataloging, arrangement and descriptions of more than 125 collections and create a centralized web database for researchers, students, and faculty. Funding will also be used to provide resources for community involvement, preservation workshops for small institutions, and a methods course on archival researchers geared toward high school students.
GW faculty in Africana Studies plan to develop courses built around the collections, while Bernard Demczuk, assistant vice president for District relations, will develop courses to be taught GW and the School Without Walls.
Six organizations, the District of Columbia Archives and Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Reese Center, the Historical Society of Washington D.C., the National Museum of American History’s Archives Center, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, will provide their collections to the database.
GW will contribute Gelman Library’s Washingtonia collection and its collection regarding former D.C. council member, Walter Fauntroy.
For more information on the GW grant:
http://gwtoday.gwu.edu/university-receives-grant-establish-dc-africana-archives-project
To learn more about other 2013 CLIR-funded projects: