Creating Electronic Catalog of the Howard Thurman and Sue Bailey Thurman Collections

FAIN: PW-51182-12

Boston University (Boston, MA 02215-1300)
Vita Paladino (Project Director: July 2011 to October 2014)

The cataloging and rehousing of the archives of Howard Thurman (1900-81) and his wife Sue Bailey Thurman (1903-96), who were theologians and civil rights leaders, and the reformatting of audio recordings of Thurman's lectures, sermons, and speeches, to be made freely available on the Internet.

The Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University seeks a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support at two year project to electronically catalogue and digitize the archival collections of one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary theologians, philosophers, and civil rights figures, Dr. Howard Thurman (1900-1981), and his wife, Sue Bailey Thurman (1903-1996). The intermediate goals of the project are to arrange and describe the material utilizing current archival preservation techniques, ultimately providing an electronic finding aid for each collection. The scope of the project would allow us to digitize the 675 reel-to-reel and 354 cassette audio recordings of Dr. Thurman's lectures, classes, sermons and speeches. Our ultimate goals are to publish the finding aids for both collections online and to make the digital audio recordings available on a website hosted by the Gotlieb Center, accessible to the public at no cost.