George Mason partnership amplifies HBCU history and culture

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George Mason University is equipping a new generation of archivists, scholars, and museum professionals with hands-on digital preservation skills as part of a national effort to make hidden artifacts of Black history accessible to the public.

Since 2021, George Mason has been working on a first-of-its-kind initiative with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and a number of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) across the country to archivecollections of century-old letters, photographs and other artifacts that document the Black experience. 

Deepthi Murali (second from right) and team outside the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Photo provided.

The HBCU History and Culture Access Consortium projectbrings together museum professionals, librarians, archivists, and higher education faculty to digitize, describe, and interpret materials. 

Initially, it was George Mason's technology expertise that brought the university into the project. Under the leadership of then-executive director Mills Kelly, George Mason's Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media(RRCHNM) helped develop and became a leading resource for users of the Omega S software, the primary software used to manage the project's digital archival work.  

George Mason's role was to train faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and student interns at partner institutions in digital history methodologies and metadata analysis software such as Omega S. However, as the project evolved, the university took on a broader role overseeing operations and project management.   

"We train them in broader public history writing, presenting digital public history to audiences, HTML coding, as well as how to work with AI coding," said Deepthi Muralli, assistant professor in the Department of History and Art Historyand principal investigator for the project. 

Murali began her involvement as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History and Art History.  

"The digitization itself comes from the Smithsonian," she added. "Once the materials are digitized, we step in and teach [researchers] how to do digital archival metadata work-essentially how to interpret these materials for the public." 

Joanna Söderberg. Photo provided.

Joanna Söderberg is a digital library project coordinator at Fisk University who is completing George Mason's graduate certificate in digital public humanities. Her work on the project fulfills the certificate's internship requirement. 

"Digitization is not something that many HBCUs have had access to previously, so George Mason's program has not only helped me, it'salso helped my students and peers," said Söderberg. "I could not have taken on the responsibilities of this internship without the information and knowledge that I've gain from the program; I wish I could spend more time with it."

Söderberg says her favorite part of the project is discovering and working with materials from the Black Panther Party. "It's so exciting for me to see old stuff from America good and bad because it's so vastly different from where I come from," said Söderberg, who is from Sweden.

"When you share something like this project with the community, they will reach out and engage with us as well," she said. "Sometimes through their family history or life experiences, they will have relevant materials that they weren't even aware of until viewing our digital archives. Finding ways to implement and integrate the community's narrative is a really important next step."

Student intern Annabelle Spencer, MA History '24, is a second-year PhD student in George Mason's Department of History and Arts History and worked on the project while completing her master's degree. Spencer credits her coursework with preparing her for the internship. 

"It was so interesting to work in a space that I had simultaneously been learning about," Spencer said. "My coursework was basically smaller versions of this project-it combined all the nuts and bolts of archiving, collecting, and allowed me to practice analyzing and organizing metadata and thinking about design." 

Annabelle Spencer. Photo by Benjamin Little.

"Getting to teach these storytelling skills to people from other higher education institutions is amazing," she added. "It's a big part of what it means to be a public historian." 

Participating HBCUs include Clark Atlanta University, Florida A&M University, Jackson State University, Texas Southern University, and Tuskegee University. 

"These institutions have some remarkable objects and text-based materials that have never been seen or digitized," said Murali, who is an affiliate faculty member at the RRCHNM. "We hope to bring them to the public and make the rich collections of these HBCUs visible to the world." 

The project will be featured in a travel museum and on an official website. It will also be displayed at the National Museum of African American History and Culture until summer of 2026.

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