Digitizing Civil Rights in Brooklyn: A Collaborative Project with the Brooklyn Public Library

LIS 665: Projects in Digital Archives, Pratt Institute, Spring 2017

Brooklyn CORE Oral History Digital Archive: http://brklyncore.prattsi.org/

Brooklyn CORE Oral History

In Dr. Anthony Cocciolo's course, LIS 665: Projects in Digital Archives (Spring 2017), students collaborated with the Brooklyn Public Library to digitize audio interviews from their Civil Rights in Brooklyn Collection. The course project focused on curating a digital exhibition for the Brooklyn Public Library, titled “Civil Rights in Brooklyn Oral History Collection,” using Omeka and involved digitization of compact audiocassettes.

The digitized recordings include interviews with notable Civil Rights activists from the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In these interviews, members of Brooklyn CORE describe their efforts to combat housing discrimination, segregation in Brooklyn's public schools, and inadequate municipal services in the 1960s. The oral histories were donated to the Brooklyn Collection by Dr. Brian Purnell who recorded them as part of his dissertation at New York University. A smaller subset of the collection includes segments of earlier interviews by other researchers that were obtained by Dr. Purnell for his consultation. The Finding Aid for the collection is available on BPL’s website.

I worked as a member of the Curatorial Team, which provided opportunities to contribute to the enrichment and accessibility of the Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklyn Collection. The Curatorial Team had four primary goals: to curate the collection in a way that makes it meaningful to end-users; to create research materials around the collection; to make those materials available to end-users online; to find additional materials to augment the collection. In the digital exhibition, we attempted to provide various entry points from which users may engage with these stories and build an understanding of the dynamic work of Brooklyn CORE. At the conclusion of the project, the Curatorial Team submitted a collective report and delivered a presentation.

Brooklyn CORE Oral History Digital Archive: http://brklyncore.prattsi.org/

"Curating the Civil Rights in Brooklyn Oral History Collection" by Mia Bruner, Tiffany Carcamo, Karalyn Mark, and Jo Polanco.

View presentation slides here and a downloadable version of the report here.