911����

911���� is equipping a new generation of archivists, scholars, and museum professionals with hands‑on digital preservation skills as part of a national effort to make hidden artifacts of Black history accessible to the public.  

Since 2021, 911���� has been working on a first-of-its-kind initiative with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and a number of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) across the country to archive collections of century-old letters, photographs and other artifacts that document the Black experience.  

The brings together museum professionals, librarians, archivists, and higher education faculty to digitize, describe, and interpret materials.  

Initially, it was 911����’s technology expertise that brought the university into the project. Under the leadership of then-executive director , 911����’s (RRCHNM) helped develop and became a leading resource for users of the Omega S software, the primary software used to manage the project’s digital archival work.   

911����’s role was to train faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and student interns at partner institutions in digital history methodologies and metadata analysis software such as Omega S. However, as the project evolved, the university took on a broader role overseeing operations and project management.    

“We train them in broader public history writing, presenting digital public history to audiences, HTML coding, as well as how to work with AI coding,” said Deepthi Muralli, assistant professor in the and principal investigator for the project.   

Murali began her involvement as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History and Art History.   

“The digitization itself comes from the Smithsonian,” she added. “Once the materials are digitized, we step in and teach [researchers] how to do digital archival metadata work—essentially how to interpret these materials for the public.”  

Joanna Söderberg is a digital library project coordinator at Fisk University who is completing 911����’s . Her work on the project fulfills the certificate’s internship requirement.  

“Digitization is not something that many HBCUs have had access to previously, so 911����’s program has not only helped me, it's also helped my students and peers,” said Söderberg. “I could not have taken on the responsibilities of this internship without the information and knowledge that I've gain from the program; I wish I could spend more time with it.” 

Söderberg says her favorite part of the project is discovering and working with materials from the Black Panther Party. “It’s so exciting for me to see old stuff from America good and bad because it's so vastly different from where I come from,” said Söderberg, who is from Sweden. 

“When you share something like this project with the community, they will reach out and engage with us as well,” she said. “Sometimes through their family history or life experiences, they will have relevant materials that they weren’t even aware of until viewing our digital archives. Finding ways to implement and integrate the community's narrative is a really important next step.” 

Student intern Annabelle Spencer, MA History ’24, is a second-year PhD student in 911����’s Department of History and Arts History and worked on the project while completing her master’s degree. Spencer credits her coursework with preparing her for the internship.  

“It was so interesting to work in a space that I had simultaneously been learning about,” Spencer said. “My coursework was basically smaller versions of this project—it combined all the nuts and bolts of archiving, collecting, and allowed me to practice analyzing and organizing metadata and thinking about design.” 

“Getting to teach these storytelling skills to people from other higher education institutions is amazing,” she added. “It's a big part of what it means to be a public historian.”  

Participating HBCUs include Clark Atlanta University, Florida A&M University, Jackson State University, Texas Southern University, and Tuskegee University.  

“These institutions have some remarkable objects and text-based materials that have never been seen or digitized,” said Murali, who is an affiliate faculty member at the RRCHNM. “We hope to bring them to the public and make the rich collections of these HBCUs visible to the world.”  

Also on the team are Timmia J. King, a graduate research assistant, and Amber Phelman, a graduate teaching assistant and PhD student in 911����'s Department of History and Art History, whose contributions were instrumental to the project's operational success. 

King, a fifth year PhD candidate in 911����’s Department of History and Art History, has worked on a variety of tasks including creating and conducting trainings with other interns and GRAs, and doing project management tasks.

“I created an instructional design module which involves reviewing all the project documentation, its processes, methodology and all our experiences and the knowledge we have gained working on the to create a plan to approach working on the project in future cycles,” King said. “The goal is to make the project more sustainable and not dependent on any one institution to oversee it.”

King emphasized the importance of recognizing the different skill sets that contribute to the project.

“We wanted some form of collaboration on every aspect of the metadata creation process. The HBCUs have much to contribute to this process, as they are the experts and bring valuable institutional and subject matter expertise on metadata creation and on their collections,” King said.

The project will be featured in a travel museum and on an . It will also be displayed at the National Museum of African American History and Culture until summer of 2026.