Report: “Sharing Mississippi’s History: University to Digitize Historic Archives”

From Magnolia State Live:

Audiovisual holdings in the University of Mississippi’s Department of Archives and Special Collections will be modernized and gain audiences worldwide through a new digitization project.

“Here in Archives and Special Collections, we have so many rich resources related to Mississippi and the American South,” said Greg Johnson, head of the department. “These materials have been accessible to people (but) because of the nature of the fragility of certain audiovisual formats, a lot of those have just not been able to be played.”

With support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, “We’re going to be able to make these rich resources related to the history of Mississippi, the blues, the Civil Rights Movement and much more accessible to researchers around the world,” Johnson said.

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A number of the recordings focus on civil rights, including various speeches given by James Silver, author of “Mississippi: The Closed Society,” presentations from different civil rights conferences and oral history interviews with civil rights leaders.

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Katherine Tutor, project coordinator for the initiative, agreed that the most rewarding aspect of this project will be the increased accessibility of the university’s audiovisual collections. “Certain materials are in technologically obsolete formats and are therefore underutilized,” said Tutor, who earned a master’s degree in English literature from Ole Miss in 2020. “I’m excited to see the information on these reels and tapes take on new life as researchers across the world access insights related to literary figures, blues musicians, modern political events, Mississippi folkways, among many other subjects.”

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Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Digital Preservation, Interviews, News