Houghton’s 2020-21 digitization focus: Black American history
As technology has evolved over the last 10 years, Houghton Library has digitized many of its rare treasures and made them freely available online. But while users can find Emily Dickinson’s poetry or Theodore Roosevelt’s family photographs on the library website, letters from Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth still require a trip to the Houghton Reading Room and a request to view the originals. This year, that will change. For the 2020‒21 academic year, Houghton will pause all digital projects to focus solely on building a digital collection related to Black American history. Digital Collections Program Manager Dorothy Berry will lead a team in digitizing and making discoverable thousands of materials for the online collection, called “Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom: Primary Sources from Houghton Library.” The U.S. Army’s 24th Infantry Regiment, an African American regiment, arriving at Camp Wikoff in Montauk, N.Y., in 1898. “We’ve always had these materials,...