The Civil Rights Digital Library (CRDL) brings together primary sources and educational materials on the civil rights from collections across the country. The library has three main focuses: presenting historic video footage from the University of Georgia’s television archives, serving as a portal to external collections, and providing lesson plans and other relevant materials to educators. The University of Georgia received an IMLS grant to support the project and has worked with a number of other government agencies, colleges, universities, and libraries within the state to develop the digital library. There are over 75 content partners whose materials can be accessed through the CRDL, including libraries, universities, broadcasting companies, and historical societies all over the nation.
Collection Principles
The CRDL is organized around a number of broad topics including: community organizing, the culture of the movement, particular organizations and people involved in the movement, white resistance, boycott and direct action, economic justice, legal strategies, mass protest, school desegregation, and voting rights. The digital video archive focuses on events taking place from 1955 to 1968. Beyond ensuring that information fits into this basic structure, the library seems to simply provide as much primary content as possible on the civil rights movement, in keeping with its role as a portal. Presumably, content partners were carefully selected with an eye to what types of materials they could offer to the overall collection.
The collection is searchable, of course, but also browsable in a number of different ways: by event (organized chronologically), place, person, topic, media type, contributing institution, and collection. There is also a separate section on educator resources.
Object Characteristics
Because they are drawn from such a wide variety of collections, the objects in Civil Rights Digital Library they are of many different types including sound recordings, video recordings, texts, websites, and other visual materials. In terms of content, they cover photographs, letters, political cartoons, television news broadcasts, documentaries, posters, pamphlets, reports, articles, books, interviews, and government records. Instructional materials include annotated bibliographies, quizzes, worksheets, timelines, teaching guides, slide shows, and lesson plans. When you browse by person or event, in addition to the list of collection materials, a short paragraph on background or a person’s biography is also shown.
Metadata
The CRDL does a great job of making metadata consistent across the collections to which they provide access (in fact, part of their IMLS grant money was specifically for supplementing the metadata provided by each institution). Some fields include creator, date, description of the object or abstract (sometimes including historical background information), types, subjects, contributors, online publisher, a physical description and brief citation of the original material, rights and usage.
For the digital video portion of the project, Dublin Core was used as a metadata standard and Archival Moving Image Materials, 2nd edition for descriptive standards. The grant proposal also indicates that administrative metadata follows the METS standard, although this information is not apparent from the web interface of the digital library.
Intended Audience
This digital library is clearly intended for learning and education. Its plethora of specifically designated educational resources makes it particularly helpful for teachers and school-age students, but beyond that it is useful to anyone with an interest in the civil rights movement. Because the collections from various institutions are so varied, a variety of uses for the information are supported.
Overall, I think the Civil Rights Digital Library is successful in presenting great breadth on the subject of the civil rights movement, particularly through its function as a portal which allows users to search both at the collection level and at the item level across over 75 collections. This is a great resource!
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