DPLA – the DLG B

Leo Frank and his wife Lucille in the court room for his murder trial, Georgia, 1913. Local identification number: AJCP402-102e, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Photographic Archives. Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library. — Leo Frank and his wife Lucille in the court room for his murder trial, Georgia, 1913.
Local identification number: AJCP402-102e, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Photographic Archives. Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library.

The Digital Library of Georgia is pleased to announce a new online exhibition titled Tragedy in the New South: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank that is now available through the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

The link to the exhibit is http://dp.la/exhibitions/exhibits/show/leo-frank.

On April 26, 1913, Confederate Memorial Day, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan was murdered at the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Georgia. Leo Frank, the Jewish, New York-raised superintendent of the National Pencil Company, was charged with the crime.

At the same time, Atlanta’s economy was transforming from rural and agrarian to urban and industrial. Resources for investing in new industry came from Northern states, as did most industrial leaders, like Leo Frank. Many of the workers in these new industrial facilities were children, like Mary Phagan.

Over the next two years, Leo Frank’s legal case became a national story with a highly publicized, controversial trial and lengthy appeal process that profoundly affected Jewish communities in Georgia and the South, and impacted the careers of lawyers, politicians, and publishers.

By the early twentieth century, Jewish communities had become well-established in most major Southern cities, continuing a path of migration that began during colonial times. The Leo Frank case and its aftermath revealed lingering regional hostilities from the Civil War and Reconstruction, intensified existing racial and cultural inequalities (particularly anti-Semitism), embodied socioeconomic problems (such as child labor), and exposed the brutality of lynching in the South.

This exhibit is a collaboration between DLG and DPLA staff. DPLA exhibitions cover major themes and events in American history and culture, and are widely used in education. Exhibits are comprised of items curated from collections made available by DPLA content partners. The incorporation of these shared materials ensures broader discoverability of these resources.

Tragedy in the New South: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank makes use of photographs, newspaper articles, broadsides, illustrations, letters, and other unique items to illustrate key themes, which include the setting of Atlanta in 1913, the murder of Mary Phagan, Leo Frank’s legal battle, Frank’s lynching, regional and national reactions to the lynching, and the legacy of the Frank case.

We hope that you take the time to look through this new exhibition.

If you’re interested in participating in this opportunity, make sure to cc: mcalists@uga.edu when you inquire with PopUp Archive at edison@popuparchive.com.

From DPLA’s press release, also available here:

Oakland, Calif. & Boston, MA — Libraries across the United States house tens of millions of audio and video recordings, a rich and vibrant body of cultural history and content for the public, scholars, and researchers — but the recordings are virtually impossible to search. The Digital Public Library of America is partnering with Pop Up Archive to offer discounted services to the DPLA network. DPLA Hubs and their partners will be able to take advantage of this discounted rate to make it possible for anyone to search and pinpoint exact search terms and phrases within audiovisual collections.

DPLA already provides a catalog of over eleven million records from libraries across the U.S., including many audiovisual records. Through new service offerings available exclusively to the DPLA’s 1,600+ partner organizations, Pop Up Archive will automatically transcribe, timestamp, and generate keywords for the audio collections.

“As a country, we’re creating so much more digital media with every day that passes. If 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, for libraries to keep up with the pace of audiovisual content creation, they need practices that can radically scale to meet the pace of creation,” said Anne Wootton, CEO of Pop Up Archive.

“Our goal is to connect the widest audience with the greatest amount of openly available materials in our nation’s cultural heritage institutions, and audiovisual material has been both critical to our growing collection and less searchable than other forms,” said Dan Cohen, DPLA’s Executive Director. “We’re delighted that we can work with Pop Up Archive to provide this valuable additional service to our constantly expanding network of libraries, archives, and museums.”

Since it was founded in 2012, Pop Up Archive has fostered partnerships with dozens of partners at libraries, archives, and public media organizations to index over 1,000,000 minutes of recorded sound, including over 10,000 audio items preserved at the Internet Archive (archive.org). Pop Up Archive was created in response to the need to create access to audiovisual collections through cataloging, search, and public engagement at scale, in spite of a general lack of knowledge and technical capability for handling audiovisual content. Most recently, Pop Up Archive has embarked on a project to bring full-text search and keyword tagging to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration between WGBH and the Library of Congress to identify, preserve, and make accessible as much as possible a digital archive of 40,000 hours of public media dating back to the late 1940s and selected by more than 100 public media stations and organizations with little consistent descriptive data.

The Digital Public Library of America strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. Since launching in April 2013, it has aggregated over 11 million items from over 1,600 institutions. The DPLA hubs model is establishing a national network by building off of state/regional digital libraries and myriad large digital libraries in the US, bringing together digitized and born-digital content from across the country into a single access point for end users, and an open platform for developers. The model supports or establishes local collaborations, professional networks, metadata globalization, and long-term sustainability. It ensures that even the smallest institutions have an on-ramp to participation in DPLA.

Pop Up Archive is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Pop Up Archive’s partner collections include the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, the Studs Terkel Radio Archive from the WFMT Radio Network, and tens of thousands of hours of audio from across the United States collected by StoryCorps, the New York Public Library, and numerous public media, storytelling, and oral history organizations. Learn more at www.popuparchive.org.

The Digital Public Library of America is generously supported by a number of foundations and government agencies, including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, an anonymous donor, the Arcadia Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. To find out more about DPLA, visit http://dp.la/.

Tag: DPLA

New online exhibit “Tragedy in the New South: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank”

DPLA and Pop Up Archive partner to make audiovisual collections across the U.S. searchable