Since the launch of this collaborative initiative in 2021, NMAAHC has worked with Museum and Archive Directors of the Clark Atlanta, Florida A & M, Jackson State, Texas Southern and Tuskegee Universities to build a supportive community of practice.
This section provides a wealth of resources to support HBCU stakeholders in strengthening collections stewardship, strategic planning, digital preservation, and talent pipeline development. It also features frameworks, training materials, and best practices emerging from our collaborative process and enable others to contribute to this collective impact endeavor.
Every time I come to this community; I feel that source of support. We are in that community, lifting each other up, learning from each other, and creating that network that makes community what it really is.HCAC MUSEUM DIRECTOR
Through a shared data model and collaborative metadata practices, HCAC brings selected materials from five HBCU partners together in Omeka-S to support context-rich public access and interpretation, and cross-institutional storytelling—while each institution retains ownership and intellectual control of its collections. The five collections, aggregated into the shared open access Omeka-S platform, allows them to be in dialogue with one another.
HCAC’s data model creates effective controlled vocabularies and helps fill an intellectual gap in the digital public humanities in the US. The HCAC digital archive makes it possible to share data across partner institutions and with other open access projects, ultimately augmenting and amplifying historically marginalized collections.
