Black Metropolis Research Consortium Awarded Mellon Grant
The BMRC is pleased to announce that we have received a $497,364 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to implement a consortium wide survey initiative our member institutions as well as various collections held by community based African American organizations and creators.
The BMRC will initiate a three-year consortium wide survey of all member collections related to African American history. This survey and assessment of African American primary resources will inform the prioritization of preservation and access needs and create preliminary descriptions of collections previously inaccessible to researchers.
By increasing knowledge of their archival collections, BMRC member institutions can develop grant proposals individually and collaboratively that address the access needs of their collections on a priority basis. In addition to providing data for internal analysis, information collected during the survey will be used to generate preliminary collection-level finding aids, which will be made available to the researchers through an integrated, searchable, web-accessible database of selected survey data and notes.
The grant period will be from January 2009- December 2011 and will allow for the hiring of two archivists.