the DLG B – Page 6 – blog of the Digital Library of Georgia

August 16, 2023

Digital Library Of Georgia Awards Digitization Subgrants To 7 Georgia Cultural Heritage Institutions Across The State

The Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) announced today the 7 recipients of its latest set of digitization service awards. These awards expand the scope of the Georgia communities documented in the Digital Library of Georgia. Among the awardees are 5 new partners. Awardee projects include documentation of the Leo Frank trial and folk pottery of Northeast Georgia.

The GALILEO-funded program increases the diversity of contributors to the DLG and its content. The Breman Museum, the DeKalb History Center, the Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia, Island Ford Baptist Church, and the Suwanee First United Methodist Church are all new partners. These awards enhance the DLG’s coverage of the growth of Gwinnett and DeKalb counties and of elementary education in Clarke County. Materials covering the Leo Frank trial and its aftermath will supplement those currently available. Documentation of Georgia folk life and pottery traditions rounds out the awards.

The recipients and their projects include:

Athens-Clarke County Library
Chase Street PTO Scrapbooks

Digitization of 17 scrapbooks and one photo album of the Athens-based Chase Street Elementary School’s Parent Teacher Organization from 1926 to the early 2000s.

Atlanta History Center
John Burrison Folklore Archives Collection

Digitization of oral history interviews created between Fall 1973 and Fall 1977 by Georgia State University folklore students. The interviews discuss Southern crafts, storytelling, and traditions.

The William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum
Leo M. Frank Collection

Digitization and description of the materials highlighting the repercussions experienced by those who stood up for Leo Frank’s innocence.

DeKalb History Center
Digitizing DeKalb County plat map books

Digitization of DeKalb County plat map books that detail the subdivisions, streets, and property owners throughout the county from 1912 to 1936.

Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia
Folk Pottery Project

Digitization and description of the Folk Pottery Museum Collection, composed of more than 300 ceramic objects created by Georgia folk potters from the mid-19th century onwards.

Island Ford Baptist Church
Suwanee Creek Chapter, NSDAR Historic Preservation Project

Digitization and description of the records of Sugar Hill’s earliest church, Island Ford Baptist Church, dating from 1833 to 1917. The records document enslaved individuals and the early settlers of Gwinnett County.

Suwanee First United Methodist Church
Suwanee First United Methodist Church Historical Documents

Digitization and description of the records of the first church established in Suwanee, Georgia, that document the church’s marriages, baptisms, and deaths from the 1880s through the 1950s.

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About the Athens-Clarke County Library

The Athens-Clarke County Library creates a welcoming and inclusive environment that empowers individuals and communities by providing resources that encourage discovery, imagination, and life-long learning. The Heritage Room, the headquarters of the Archives and Special Collections Department, is located on the 2nd floor of the Athens-Clarke County Library, 2025 Baxter St., Athens, Georgia, 30605. It houses a non-circulating collection of local history, genealogy, and southern history books, microfilm, and archival materials.

Link to partner website: https://athenslibrary.org/location/athens-clarke/.

About the Atlanta History Center

The Atlanta History Center, through its collections, facilities, programs, exhibitions, and publications, preserves and interprets historical subjects pertaining to Atlanta and its environs and presents subjects of interest to Atlanta’s diverse audiences.

Link to partner website: https://www.atlantahistorycenter.com/.

About the Breman Museum

The Breman, Atlanta’s Jewish Museum is home to the permanent exhibition Absence of Humanity: The Holocaust Years, 1933-1945; the Blonder Family Gallery dedicated to Southern Jewish History; and the Schwartz Gallery, which hosts a variety of traveling and rotating exhibitions. The Museum Library and Cuba Family Archives add to our on-site offerings while The Weinberg Center for Holocaust Education provides a wonderful educational resource for students, teachers, and lifelong learners.

Link to partner website: https://www.thebreman.org/.

About the DeKalb History Center

The DeKalb History Center collects, preserves, and shares the wide-ranging stories of the people and places of DeKalb County.

Link to partner website: https://dekalbhistory.org/.

About the Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia

The Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia showcases the handcraft skills of one of the South’s premier grassroots art forms and explores the historical importance and changing role of folk pottery in Southern life.

Link to partner website: https://www.snca.org/fpm/about/about.php.

About Island Ford Baptist Church

Island Ford Baptist Church is located at 850 Island Ford Road, Buford , GA 30518.

Link to partner website: https://www.facebook.com/IslandFordBaptistChurch/.

About Suwanee First United Methodist Church

Suwanee First United Methodist Church’s purpose is to celebrate life, communicate the gospel, and to imitate Jesus in all that is. The church is located at 603 Scales Rd NW, Suwanee, GA 30024.

Link to partner website: http://suwaneechurch.org/.

July 26, 2023October 4, 2023

Oral history interviews of W. W. Law, civil rights workers, and 20-century Savannah civil rights history are now available freely online

Selected by statewide cultural heritage stakeholders and funded by the DLG’s competitive digitization grant program, this collection is the Walter J. Brown Media Archives’s fourth collaboration with the DLG and is available here: https://dlg.usg.edu/collection/ugabma_wwlaw.

The content for this project consists of oral history interview videos with W. W. Law and other Savannah, Georgia, community members involved in the Civil Rights movement. The tapes were shot just prior to Mr. Law’s death and are the longest and most detailed interviews he did on his life and career as a Civil Rights activist.

The footage was shot in 2001 by Lisa Friedman with the help of the late oral historian Cliff Kuhn for the purpose of creating a documentary on the life of W. W. Law. Although that project never came to completion, it still managed to yield important historical content about Savannah civil rights workers and community leaders, including Aaron Buschbaum, Dr. Clyde W. Hall, Edna Branch Jackson, Ida Mae Bryant, Rev. Edward Lambrellis, Richard Shinholster, Tessie Rosanna Law, Dr. Amos C. Brown, Mercedes Arnold Wright, Carolyn Coleman, E.J. Josey, Walter J. Leonard, and Judge H. Sol Clark.

W. W. Law was fired from his job working for the post office in 1961 because of his civil rights work but was reinstated after an intervention by NAACP leaders and U.S. President John F. Kennedy. As with all civil rights movements in American towns and cities, stories of lesser-known activists in the Civil Rights Movement and the historical impact made by community leaders like Law and the others interviewed in this project are invaluable for researchers interested in the history of civil rights in Georgia.

Luciana Spracher, director of the City of Savannah Municipal Archives, defines the importance of digital access to this content and the stewardship of this audiovisual work that was granted to the Brown Media Archives and made accessible through this DLG subgrant:

“The City of Savannah Municipal Archives’s W. W. Law Collection represents his life’s work, as left behind by him at the time of his death in 2002. The Walter J. Brown and Peabody Awards Collection’s collection of W. W. Law material includes video interviews where Mr. Law discussed his life and legacy less than a year before his death, as well as interviews with people, well-represented in the papers of our collections that document civil rights activities in Savannah. Both collections complement and enhance understanding of the other. The opportunity to hear these individuals recall the events represented in our collections is invaluable to students and historians who are studying and learning from them. Greater discoverability of the interviews online will assist researchers in seeking insight into the Civil Rights Movement in Savannah, as well as the larger Movement in Georgia and the United States.”

[View the entire collection online]

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About the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection:

The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection is home to more than 350,000 analog audiovisual items, over 5,000,000 feet of newsfilm, and over 200,000 digital files. It is the third-largest broadcasting archive in the country, behind only the Library of Congress and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The Archives comprise moving image and sound collections that focus on American television and radio broadcasting and Georgia’s music, folklore, and history; this includes local television news and programs, audio folk music field tapes, and home movies from rural Georgia. In the Peabody Collection alone, there are more than 50,000 television programs and more than 39,500 radio programs. Its mission is to preserve, protect, and provide access to the moving image and sound materials that reflect the collective memory of broadcasting and the history of the state of Georgia and its people. Learn more at libs.uga.edu/media/index.html

About the Digital Library of Georgia

The Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) serves as Georgia’s statewide cultural heritage digitization initiative. It is a joint project between the University of Georgia Libraries and GALILEO. The DLG collaborates with Georgia’s cultural heritage and educational institutions to provide free online access to historic resources on Georgia. The DLG not only develops, maintains, and preserves digital collections and online resources, but also partners to build digitization capacity and technical infrastructure. It acts as Georgia’s service hub for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and facilitates cooperative digitization initiatives. The DLG serves as the home of the Georgia Newspaper Project, Georgia’s print journalism preservation project.

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