A new episode of Africa Past & Present was released on June 1. This episode features Dr. Peter Limb of Michigan State University (MSU) as he discusses the life and writings of Dr. Alfred Bitini Xuma. An important figure in the history of South Africa, Xuma was the first black physician in Johannesburg and served as President-General of the African National Congress (ANC) from 1940 to 1949.

Limb’s discussion is based on his recently published book, A. B. Xuma: Autobiography and Selected Works. By reflecting on Xuma’s autobiography, his correspondence, essays and speeches on health, politics, crime, beer, the pass laws, and the rights of African women, Limb illuminates some of the tensions and controversies Xuma faced during his career and describes his historical legacy for South Africa.

Africa Past & Present is a joint project between MATRIX and the MSU Department of History. The project works to make regular podcasts focused on issues of African history, culture, and politics. Visit their site to learn more about the project, download this podcast, and explore past episodes.

Episode 63 of Africa Past and Present was released Wednesday, May 16 2012. The episode features a conversation with Professor Tom Turner, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Country Specialist at Amnesty International USA.

Africa Past and Present is hosted by Michigan State University historians Peter Alegi and Peter Limb and produced by MATRIX. Subscribe to the podcast on the Africa Past and Present website and on iTunes.

How do you preserve information of continuing value and make it available for anyone who might want to use it? Those are the challenges faced by archivists, and teaching students the craft and science of archiving is a tricky business. It has become even more challenging with trillions of digital objects – both born digital and digitized – needing persistence.

Professor Steve Cohen, who works at MATRIX and specializes in learning design and assessment, has been collaborating with Professors David A. Wallace and Beth Yakel at the University of Michigan School of Information to integrate digital archiving tools into their graduate courses. The project, PAVEL (Preservation and Access Virtual Education Laboratory) is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for two years. Recently Professors Cohen and Yakel presented results from the first year of the project at AERI (Archival Education Research Institute). To date UM students have found learning and using the tools an insightful experience. They report gaining insight into the complexity of the digital world that will be home to archived digital objects, and feel that knowing the tools will help them once they once they complete their Master’s degrees. Ultimately the PAVEL will produce a curricular models and an assessment strategy ,  for archiving programs around the world to follow when integrating these tools into their courses.

As part of MATRIX’s collaborative IMLS grant to develop best practices for conducting oral history in a digital age, Scott Pennington, Head of MATRIX’s Digital Lab, traveled to New York recently to meet with the Oral History in the Digital Age (OHDA) Video curating group and advisors. Participants, including collaborators from the private sector as well as Columbia University Library, began to outline and write best practices for collecting and curating digital video for oral historians. The group’s ultimate goal is to identify new methods for collecting, curating, and distributing data as oral history moves from analog audio to digital video recording. The OHDA best practices guide is on target to enter final draft status by the end of April.

Jesse Johnston, master’s degree student at the School of Information at the University of Michigan, is collaborating with Catherine Foley, MATRIX Digital Librarian, to finalize videotape preservation policies and documentation for the American Black Journal archive.

American Black Journal went on the air in 1968 as a televised public forum for black citizens during an historic moment of racial turmoil across the United States.  Detroit Public Television (DPTV) has broadcast the program continuously since then.  As a result the ABJ video collection represents one of the most extensive audio-visual records of local African American culture and history in existence.

Since 2000, DPTV and MATRIX have worked together to catalog, provide access to, and preserve the American Black Journal videotape collection.  Toward these goals and in fulfillment of a National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access grant, Johnston and Foley are describing current videotape preservation and access practices at MATRIX and defining a preservation framework for the ABJ digital video collection.

In conjunction with the Department of History at Michigan State University, MATRIX conducted a three-day training workshop and nearly one week post-workshop consulting at the National Records Service in Banjul, The Gambia.  Professor Walter Hawthorne, Chair of the Department of History; Scott Pennington, Head of Digitization at MATRIX; and Bala Saho, The Gambia’s Director General of the National Counsel for Arts and Culture, coordinated with local archive staff to assess and begin preservation and digitization of important 19th century government records.

This work is made possible by generous funding from the Endangered Archives Program at the British Library, and was featured on The Gambian Television and Radio Services News Broadcast.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the primary source of federal support for the nation’s museums and libraries, announces that 13 institutions are receiving National Leadership Collaborative Planning Grants (NLG) totaling $763,715. Grantees will contribute $491,995 in matching funds. There were 62 applications to the program with requests totaling $3,752,309.

Michigan State University Museum is one of two organizations in Michigan to receive funding and the nearly $100,000 grant will be used to expand technology and access for its innovative online resource, the Quilt Index. (The other institution in Michigan to receive a grant is the Ann Arbor Hands-on Museum for a partnership concerning literacy in rural communities.)

The NLG program includes two types of collaborative planning grants, which enable multi-institution project teams to work together to either plan a single project or to produce a white paper that will encourage multiple projects; and project grants, including both research and implementation grants, for which that preliminary work has already been done.

The MSU Museum project encompasses:
Award Amount: $98,173; Matching: $54,136
Grant Category: Library-Museum Collaboration–Level II Collaborative Planning Grant
Project Title: “The Quilt Index: Collaborative Planning for Internationalization”
The Quilt Index is a popular online scholarly and cultural resource that is growing increasingly global in its content and the communities it serves. Internationalization is encouraging, but it presents new challenges, such as supporting multilingual indexing, searching, and retrieval of information. The Michigan State University Museum, partnering with the MATRIX Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online, the Alliance for American Quilts, and the International Quilt Study Center will identify key challenges for globally constructed and shared online resources, and develop a model plan that responds to those challenges.

“National Leadership Collaborative Planning Grants provide opportunities to conduct research and develop the framework to support future projects that have the potential to generate new tools, research, models, services, practices, or alliances that will positively impact museums, libraries, and the communities they serve,” said IMLS Acting Director Marsha L. Semmel. “These projects encourage partnerships that address national issues of importance impacting education, scholarship, and public service and encourage the broad application of standards and models to improve professional practice.”
IMLS National Leadership Collaborative Planning Grants position museums and libraries as partners with other community institutions — from medical centers to gardens and nature centers — in ways that explore assess community needs, solve problems and share data more widely.  For a state-by-state list of grant recipients, see:  http://www.imls.gov/news/2010/073010b_list.shtm#MI .

About the Quilt Index
The Quilt Index (http://www.quiltindex.org) launched seven years ago, and was developed at Michigan State University by the MSU Museum and MATRIX, the Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online. The third primary partner is the Alliance for American Quilts, based in Asheville, N.C., a non-profit organization comprised of a broad range of key scholars, curators, librarians, and quilt artists in the U.S. dedicated to the study, preservation, and sharing of American quilt history. Over the years, the Quilt Index’s growth and expansion has been supported by grants from IMLS and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Quilt Index merges tradition with technology and springs from the work of a uniquely-specialized team of researchers and experts who are committed to making significant quilt-related data accessible for research and teaching as well as developing replicable applications of technology in the humanities.

The online resource extends understanding and use of the museum’s textile collections. The MSU Museum’s Great Lakes Quilt Center has evolved from the sustained and significant quilt-related activities and resources at the Michigan State University Museum and the museum’s long-standing interest in and commitment to preserving and presenting traditional arts history. More than 700 historic and contemporary textiles in the MSU Museum’s collections are used for exhibition and research, and the Quilt Index, in part, helps make these collections – and others — more connected to repositories and users worldwide.

About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services, Washington, D.C., is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute’s mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. The Institute works at the national level and in coordination with state and local organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; enhance learning and innovation; and support professional development. To learn more about the Institute, please visit www.imls.gov.

Africa Past and Present, the podcast about history, culture, and politics in Africa and the diaspora, is featured on today’s AHA blog. Produced by Matrix and hosted by MSU faculty members Peter Alegi and Peter Limb, Africa Past and Present highlights interesting and significant people, ideas, and discussions in African Studies from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives.

Africa Past and Present is hosted by Michigan State University historians Peter Alegi and Peter Limb and produced by Matrix.

In this 31st episode, part 2 (of 3) in a series on African Diasporas, hosts Peter Alegi and Peter Limb discuss Dr. Robert Vinson’s (History, College of William and Mary) work on the spread of Garveyism in South Africa and its political and cultural impact. Vinson joins the discussion and explains how black men and women in the 1920s and 30s appropriated Garvey’s ideas of racial pride, pan-Africanism, and modernity to sustain themselves and to propel South Africa’s struggle for freedom.

In August the MATRIX/History Department Africa Past and Present podcast, co-hosted by Peter Alegi and Peter Limb, set new records for unique visitors and for total number of visits in a single month. With four months left (and six more shows) in 2009, download stats are already nearly double the downloads from all of 2008. Thanks for listening!