The archival materials of the Afro American Newspaper, which have been examined and organized by two Hopkins departments, were presented last night.
The Sheridan Libraries' Center for Educational Resources and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences' Center for Africana Studies worked jointly on the project for three years. The work was funded through a $476,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
"It's probably the most extensive black history archive in the country," Moira Hinderer, the project's manager and a professor in the Center for Africana Studies, said. "It's just an amazing collection."
The Afro, founded in 1892, is a Baltimore-area paper covering local, national and even international news. Its archive, or morgue, has grown steadily throughout its 120-year history, encompassing photographs, clippings and documents chronicling the African American experience in Maryland and elsewhere.
"We realized that what we had was more valuable than the dust it was collecting," John Jacob Oliver, the CEO of the Afro, said. "We're excited that we are indeed unfolding." Oliver is the great grandson of Afro founder John J. Murphy.
Cataloguing the archive, which contains more than 1.5 million items, was extremely labor intensive and required collaboration between many local institutions. It even prompted the development of a robot that automatically takes photos from a pile, photographs their backs and scans them into a database. Named "Gado," the robot is part of a project developed by Hopkins graduate Tom Smith.
"I built a prototype, this massive thing that required woodworking and soldering skills," Smith said. "I did about 1,000 images like that to show the concept worked. The new model is made with laser cut pieces and weighs a lot less."
Smith's robot has digitized a small portion of the Afro archives, but the majority of items have only been catalogued.
"If we can find funding we'd really like to do large scale digitization and expand our outreach," Hinderer said. "This isn't a service project, it's a partnership."
The archive holds great promise as a resource for scholars, students and the larger Baltimore community.
"We are determined to continue this fine project," Franklin Knight, Director of the Center for Africana Studies, said.
