Digitizing W.E.B. Du Bois

FAIN: PW-50695-10

University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Amherst, MA 01003-9242)
Robert Sayre Cox (Project Director: July 2009 to May 2014)

The digitization of 169 linear feet of text and image materials on the life of African American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst requests $349,787 to complete digitization of the papers of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the most influential African American intellectuals and activists of the twentieth century. Begun in April 2009 with a grant from the Verizon Foundation, this project will provide free and unfettered online access to a large and extraordinarily diverse manuscript collection, one of the most important in the nation for study of twentieth century African American history and the origins of the modern Civil Rights movement. Access to the digital collections will be provided through an online repository hosted by the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at UMass Amherst. Built on Fedora-Repository, the open source software, this archive will be made available at no charge to anyone with a connection to the world wide web, and the content will be also made available to secondary school educators through Verizon's Thinkfinity website.