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The Digital Library of Georgia is pleased to announce the availability of the Southern School News now in the Civil Rights Digital Library and soon the Digital Public Library of America.

The Southern School News Archive provides online access to the complete run of the newspaper, published from 1954 until 1965. The monthly paper was the product of the Southern Education Reporting Service, a Ford Foundation-backed group of Southern newspaper editors who sought to report on issues in desegregation in schools of all sizes and levels — from the smallest rural schoolhouses to large state universities — across the American South. The aim of this project was clear and solid: report the events impartially, dispassionately, and as completely as possible.

The newspaper outlined its mission in each issue:

Southern School News is the official publication of the Southern Education Reporting Service, an objective, fact-finding agency established by southern newspaper editors and educators with the aim of providing accurate, unbiased information to school administrators, public officials and interested lay citizens on developments in education arising from the U.S. Supreme Court opinion of May 17, 1954 declaring segregation in the schools unconstitutional. SERS is not an advocate, is neither pro-segregation nor anti-segregation, but simply reports the facts as it finds them, state by state.

The Southern School News Archive is available through the Civil Rights Digital Library, a rich digital resource that serves as a portal providing a seamless virtual library on the Civil Rights Movement drawing on holdings from more than 75 libraries and allied organizations from across the nation.

Southern School News, October 1963. Featured stories include the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, and debate surrounding President Kennedy's civil rights bill (later to be signed into law as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by President Johnson). — Southern School News, October 1963. Featured stories include the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, and debate surrounding President Kennedy’s civil rights bill (later to be signed into law as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by President Johnson).

As a service hub for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) provides digitization and metadata assistance for its partner institutions around the state. The DLG also aggregates and shares metadata about digital items with the DPLA, allowing the DPLA to act as a portal to these collections. Thanks to grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Arcadia Fund, the Digital Library of Georgia has digitized and described these items for inclusion in both the DLG and the DPLA.

The Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) is pleased to announce the addition of the McDuffie Museum Collection to the DLG and to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

http://goo.gl/DwyfXg

The collection includes digitized photographs, letters, newspapers, postcards, maps and government documents from the American Revolution through the early twentieth century. Though a small collection of fifty-three items, it is a highly curated group of high-interest pieces, including an 1864 map of Cobb County hand-drawn by a Union spy, a letter written by Abraham Lincoln while an attorney in Illinois, and an 1864 photograph of General Sherman and his troops gathered near Atlanta. The collection also contains two issues of “The Jeffersonian,” in which Thomas E. Watson, the Georgian politician and publisher, rails against criticism of the infamous hanging of Leo Frank, who was convicted of murdering 13 year-old Mary Phagan in 1915. Of particular interest is a series of stereographic cards, a nineteenth century 3-D imaging technique in which two offset images produce a three-dimensional image when viewed with a device (or with crossed eyes).

The DLG invited the volunteer director of the McDuffie Museum, Lewis Smith, and his wife JoAnn, to bring the collection materials from Thomson, Georgia to Athens for scanning and metadata capture. This is the first of the DLG/DPLA digitization projects that, from start to finish, was executed in-house.

As a service hub for the DPLA, the Digital Library of Georgia provides digitization and metadata assistance for its partner institutions around the state. The DLG also aggregates and shares metadata about digital items with the DPLA, allowing the DPLA to act as a portal to these collections. Thanks to grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Arcadia Fund, the Digital Library of Georgia has digitized and described these items for inclusion in both the DLG and the DPLA. The McDuffie Museum Collection will be a rich resource for students of Southern history.

Author: admin

Southern School News Archive

McDuffie Museum Collection