UMass digitizing Du Bois archives in worldwide reach

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GORDON DANIELS

birthday telegram to Dr. Du Bois from his secretary, Lillian Hyman (((kristen may mention)))

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GORDON DANIELS

Robert Cox and Danielle Kovacs SEE pix 1A for more info

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GORDON DANIELS

Robert Cox, head of special collections and university archives, and Danielle Kovacs, curator of manuscripts and university archives, display some of the W. E. B. Du Bois collection at the UMass library that bears the eminent scholar's name.

AMHERST - Fifty years ago there were few people who did not know who W.E.B. Du Bois was.

Today, many people scratch their heads and puzzle over why the University of Massachusetts has a "Doo Bwah" library.

An African-American writer, activist and political leader at the start of the 20th century, Du Bois (pronounced Doo Boys) is about to get a boost back into cultural prominence.

Through a $200,000 grant from the Verizon Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Verizon Communications, UMass is digitizing the more than 110,000 items in its Du Bois special collection - 168 linear feet of correspondence, pictures, pamphlets, mementos, novels, essays and secondary resources other people compiled about Du Bois.

The Du Bois digitization will begin this summer and is expected to take two years to complete.

UMass plans to employ the equivalent of three full-time employees, mostly graduate and undergraduate students, to scan every piece of the university's Du Bois collection and catalog the items. Cataloging is expected to consume most of the project's work. Every scanned item will contain a description of what that item is and its relationship to a larger historical context.

Restoring legacy

The Du Bois collection, which has been hosted by UMass since 1973, will be put online and open at no charge to the worldwide community. The site will also carry lesson plans on how to utilize the collection to teach primary, secondary and postsecondary students about Du Bois and the topics he addressed in his papers.

"In our time his legacy has faded," said Robert S. Cox, special collections archivist at UMass. "This will be a way to bring him back to the limelight.

Born in Great Barrington in 1868, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was a founding member of the Niagara Movement, a group that evolved into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A prolific and confrontational writer, he expounded on the necessity of racial, economical and gender equality, demilitarization and the destructive nature of colonialism among other social justice topics. Du Bois wrote many novels, plays and poems, but may be best remembered for his 1903 book, "The Souls of Black Folk."

Du Bois' opinions were sought by world leaders and intellectuals, including Langston Hughes, Mohandas Gandhi, Mao Zedong of the People's Republic of China, Booker T. Washington and Albert Einstein, according to UMass.

In 1960, at age 92, Du Bois moved to Ghana, where he died three years later.

Putting an entire scholarly collection based on a single individual online is becoming a more common endeavor, as the Internet has only recently developed the capacity to handle such large resources of scanned data in a user-friendly way, Cox said. While millions of books have been scanned and posted online, an individual's written life is rare on the Web.

Jefferson project

Among similar efforts is a plan to digitize Thomas Jefferson's papers and the National Library of Medicine's work to digitize the lives and writings of some notable scientists, Cox said.

"There're very few digitizations of individuals as comprehensive and complete as what we're doing," said Emily S. Silverman, director of development and communications for the UMass libraries. "We're not the first, but we're certainly advanced."

Collection digitization is an endeavor that takes time, patience and a whole lot of research, but not too much in the way of high-tech acrobatics, Cox said.

Most of the work will take place in the "Du Bois Room," a small stockroom behind an anonymous, thick wooden door on the 25th floor of the Du Bois Library. The room is filled with 400 lavender archival boxes labeled with Du Bois' signature and containing his papers. The low hum of a sensitive ventilation system fills the room.

A computer terminal sits quietly in the corner. Holding a 5-foot-tall framed piece of red silk featuring an embroidered bird- a birthday card from Mao to Du Bois on the occasion of his 91st birthday - Cox said he plans to add two more terminals in the room and a couple of scanners to equip the digitization project.

Cox and Danielle M. Kovacs, curator of collections, are now working on developing a set of keywords to help this process go more smoothly. This common vernacular will help archivists quickly catalog the material, but will also improve the public's ability to accurately search for information. Once the digitization is completed, the materials will be available at a UMass-based Web site.

Kovacs said she receives several phone calls per day from scholars interested in the Du Bois collection. It's an exciting prospect, she said, to see what people will distill from the database once it's online.