Africana Libraries in the Information Age
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Africana Libraries in the Information Age was a conference held on January 27-28, 1995, at the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.
The Schomburg Center, one of the world's leading research facilities devoted to the preservation of materials on the global African and African diasporan experiences, which is located in the New York Public Library, currently houses over 5,000,000 items pertaining to black history and culture. By the 1990s, the information age emerged, revolving computers and public access to the Internet, or the World Wide Web. The Internet started to become the alternative library. Libraries and research centers began to post vast amounts of information on the World Wide Web about anything and everything, but there was little to be found about the African culture.
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[edit] Conference
In January of 1995, the Schomburg Center decided to do something about the lack of information on the Internet of the Black experience. Beginning on January 27, representatives from libraries, museums, and other repositories as well as scholars in African American Diasporan and African Studies gathered at the Schomburg Center to assess the current state of information on the Internet on African history for two days. At the beginning of the 20th century, libraries and research centers had no books or artifacts documenting the history or heritage of people of African descent. The myth that Black people had no history or culture was so strong that even Black people started to accept it. The opening of the Schomburg Center helped defer this myth, but the beginning of the information age was making the African American culture scarce again. This conference held at the Schomburg Center called representatives to explore strategies for keeping African resources in existence throughout the 21st century.
[edit] Outcome
The conference found that there was very little information on the web about the Black experience and culture and no other institution had planned on doing anything about this. They took charge to fix this dilemma, and presently, more than a decade later, the Internet is full of Africana-related resources.
[edit] Follow-up
Six years after the original conference took place, a follow-up to the conference was held to assess the changes that have occurred. Future development of Africana libraries and resources on the Internet and in digital format was discussed in order to continue to provide documentation of black history and culture.
[edit] References
- Alkalimat, Abdul (2004). The African American Experience in Cyberspace. Pluto Press. ISBN 0745322220.
