Contents: Overview | Support | Project Summary

Overview

The Amplifying Black Voices in Iowa is an online portal providing unified access to a selection of digitized resources from throughout Iowa. Resources include newspapers, manuscripts, oral histories, photographs, and artifacts dating back to the mid-1800s. They are held in the collections of all participating organizations: Iowa State University Library, African American Museums of Iowa, Des Moines Public Library, Fort Des Moines Museum and Education Center, Grinnell College Libraries, Grout Museum District, Nodaway Valley Historical Museum, and State Historical Society of Iowa.

Project Summary

“Amplifying Black Voices in Iowa” was supported by a $179,000 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices program. The grant program is made possible by funding from the Mellon Foundation. The four year grant project with eight partner organizations (including ISU) digitized and made publicly available over 6,000 resources highlighting the impact of Black communities across Iowa. The resources are unified here in a single online space and include newspapers, manuscripts, oral histories, photographs, and artifacts dating back to the mid-1800s. They are held in the collections of all participating organizations: Iowa State University Library, African American Museums of Iowa, Des Moines Public Library, Fort Des Moines Museum and Education Center, Grinnell College Libraries, Grout Museum District, Nodaway Valley Historical Museum, and State Historical Society of Iowa.

The portal elevates the histories, shared experiences, and achievements of Black communities throughout the state of Iowa, allows users to search across the materials from all the partner institutions, and explore these resources in a variety of ways. The project is similar to others created and maintained by the ISU library and the grant’s partner organizations, featuring digitized archival material held by the library and partners documenting broad topical areas such as Iowa history, agriculture, technology, the sciences, and university history. Some examples of these other digital collections include AvIAn Archives of Iowa Online and WOI-TV news clips (both also supported in previous years by grants from the Council on Library and Information Resources), as well as the Iowa county histories collection, the Agricultural machinery literature collection, WOI-TV news clips (CLIR supported grant), John Vincent Atanasoff collection, and the Ada Hayden collection.

Support

This project was supported by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The grant program is made possible by funding from the Mellon Foundation.