Digitizing History

Funded by grants from the Ford Foundation, IBM, and Virginia Commonwealth University, VCU has built the Multicultural Archives database, principally comprising documents borrowed from the African-American community. The documents are scanned, processed by optical character recognition technology, and stored on optical disks. By using this technology, we have gained access to materials privately held and seldom shared, since owners of the documents usually will not donate them. To help publicize the project and encourage public participation, we organized a Black History Archives Project Advisory Board, working with Virginia Union University (a nearby African-American institution) and the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia. The project owes its success to resolution of interdependent political and technical problems.