About Grinnell College Black Library
The Black Library is more than a simple speciality section of the library; it’s a result of incredible student activism by Grinnell students, aimed at promoting greater social justice, representation, and equality in the library. Located on the second floor of Burling Library, the Black Library houses a small portion of scholarship and writings by African and African American scholars available at Burling Library.
About this collection
This project initially started with the goal to create a poster exhibit near Burling Library’s Black Library to explain its history to patrons of the library. During the creation of the poster exhibit, we discovered that there was a rich vein of archival material that aided in the understand of the events of 1971, and we wanted to make these materials more accessible to alumni, students and others interested in learning about this event. We especially wanted this project to be available for the 50th reunion of the class of 1974, many of whom were involved in the Burling Takeover and oversaw the implementation of CBS’s demands.
Additionally, the members of the Burling Library were in the process of experimenting with new means of displaying our digital collections. We were interested in testing CollectionBuilder, an open source framework for creating digital collection and exhibit websites, for this purpose. The items and metadata we had collected for the physical Black Library exhibit seemed like the perfect material to use for testing this software. Mark McFate, Digital Library Applications Developer, and Libby Cave, Digital Humanities and Instruction Term Librarian, teamed up to create the project. McFate handled much of the information technology infrastructure of the project, while Cave handle the research and exhibit creation. CollectionBuilder proved to be a great match for this project as its static approach allows for long-term sustainability, and it’s many built-in features allows for deeper discoverability and interpretation of the materials. Moreover, the flexibility of the tool allowed for us to create a “People” page, so users, especially those who were directly involved, can see the documents, photos, and other items associated with specific person.
Special Thanks
Petrouchka Moïse, Cultural & Community-based Digital Curator, and B. Jenée Spencer, Director of Intercultural Affairs & Black Student Specialist, provided invaluable expertise on the historic Black experience at Grinnell College. We are deeply grateful for their time, expertise and input!
The project received significant assistance from Grinnell College’s Archives and Special Collections team, Chris Jones and Allison Haack. Thank you for your help!
Technical Credits - CollectionBuilder
This digital collection is built with CollectionBuilder, an open source framework for creating digital collection and exhibit websites that is developed by faculty librarians at the University of Idaho Library following the Lib-Static methodology.
Using the CollectionBuilder-CSV template and the static website generator Jekyll, this project creates an engaging interface to explore driven by metadata.