eBlackChampaign-Urbana

eBlackChampaign-Urbana Announcement for American History Teachers Collaborative

The eBlackChampaign-Urbana (eBlackCU) project is a University of Illinois-led project that seeks to 1) Centralize information on local African-American history and culture and create new knowledge through this centralization; 2) Involve past and present community residents in the production of knowledge by soliciting their contributions, both in the form of personal memories and in the form of digitized personal archives; 3) Create a community of scholars, activists, educators, students and citizens interested in learning more about various aspects of local African-American history and culture and using that knowledge in the present; and 4) Develop the best-practices to scale this project up to the state-level in the implementation of
eBlackIllinois: A Comprehensive Database on the Black Experience in Illinois.

The project's web address is http://www.eBlackCU.net.

The project started in November 2009 and will continue at least through the end of December 2010, with our hopes being to find a way to continue the project, or aspects of the project.

Our products have thus far included:
a) A bibliography of information sources on local African-American issues, http://eblackcu.net/portal/items/show/2
b) A digital library of newly digitized information sources and websites on local African-American issues, http://eblackcu.net/portal/
c) Two digital exhibits that bring together these information sources in a narrative frame-work on Salem Baptist Church and the North First Street Business Community, http://eblackcu.net/portal/exhibits

We intend to add more items to the bibliography, more digitized texts to the digital library and more digital exhibits throughout the year.

Our goal in all of this is to make the project as collaborative as possible. ANYONE can submit information of ANY type to the website using our contribute form: http://eblackcu.net/portal/contribution.
All submissions are vetted by the project team before appearing online and e-mails are required in case follow-up contact with submitters are required.

In addition to the website we will have three other main outputs from this project: 1) A print/digital publication of University of Illinois research relating to local African-American issues written at a level accessible to a high school audience which will be distributed to area high school and public libraries, as well as to community groups, and will also be available online; 2) A campus-community symposium slated for November 5-6 (location TBA) that will focus on the documentation of African-American history in Champaign-Urbana, research on local African-American issues, digital technology and African-American culture, and broadband and the future of the African-American Community in Champaign-Urbana. All are welcome to attend and more information will be distributed as it is announced; and 3) We are hiring six high school and Parkland age African-American interns to learn how the eBlackCU website works, become proficient in digital libraries/digital exhibits, and serve as spiders to get the project spread throughout the community. Our second goal in hiring interns is to help them and their peers get into the University of Illinois.

All are welcome to contribute to and become a part of this project.
For volunteer opportunities and to stay up-to-date with news on the project as it happens visit our blog http://eblackcu.net/blog/ and Facebook page: http://tinyurl.com/2clbrta.

The project director for eBlackCU is Noah Lenstra (nlenstr2@illinois.edu), a Certificate of Advanced Study student in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science
(http://www.lis.illinois.edu/) at UIUC and the supervising investigator is Abdul Alkalimat (mcworter@illinois.edu), Professor of African-American Studies (http://www.afro.illinois.edu/) and Library and Information Science. This project is funded by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Public Engagement (http://engagement.illinois.edu/) and the Community Informatics Initiative (http://cii.illinois.edu/). Public partners include the Champaign County Historical Archives (http://www.urbanafreelibrary.org/archives/), Urbana Free Library; and the Early American Museum (http://www.earlyamericanmuseum.org/): The Heritage Center of Champaign County, Champaign County Forest Preserve.