Slave Societies Digital Archive

The agreement, signed by university and Canadian officials during a Dec. 3 ceremony at Vanderbilt’s Special Collections and University Archives, marks the second five-year collaboration between the two organizations and reaffirms their shared commitment to advancing academic collaboration and fostering innovative research. The new collaboration establishes the Fulbright Canada Distinguished Chair at Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science, with the recipients working closely with the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries.  Read More

As classes get underway this fall, the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries are here to support students in a variety of ways. Check out the following 10 tips to make the most of all the libraries have to offer. Read More

A new article in EdTech Magazine and a case study by the Center for Digital Education highlight how the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries continue to innovate in the area of digital preservation. Both items detail efforts to scale up and make sustainable the Heard Libraries’ one-of-a-kind Vanderbilt Television News Archive, the world’s most extensive and complete archive of television broadcast news. Read More

Vanderbilt University and the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries won three awards at the ninth annual Association of Research Libraries Film Festival on May 8 at the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  The “ARLies” recognize excellence in multimedia projects that highlight library collections and their impact. This year’s festival featured 34 submissions from major research libraries across North America.   Read More

The Cultural Heritage Preservation Summit, hosted by the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries this summer, brought together experts from across the United States and Canada and showcased the libraries’ leadership in digital preservation and access. Read More

The new Digital Lab combines three library departments—Digital Scholarship and Communications, the Digital Commons, and the Center for Digital Humanities—into one overarching unit, realizing efficiencies that advance the Heard Libraries’ goal of facilitating transdisciplinary research and teaching through cohesive services. Read More

Vanderbilt University is now a member of the International Image Interoperability Framework, an international consortium of universities and other cultural heritage institutions using a standard for viewing, comparing and annotating digital objects. Read More

Professional schools across the university helped set the stage for Discovery Vanderbilt’s commitment to expanding research and collaboration. Read More

Vanderbilt University has become the newest member of the Universities Studying Slavery consortium as part of its reinvigorated commitment to confront racial injustice while working toward a more inclusive and welcoming campus community. Read More

Daniel Genkins, a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of History, worked with the Data Science Institute to build a machine learning pipeline to process digitized ecclesiastical records that touch on the lives of people of African descent, both free and enslaved, in the early modern Atlantic. Read More

Benn Torres is joined by a team of faculty across a range of disciplines, from anthropology and history to Latin American studies and literature, who are filling in the gaps of our knowledge about the African diaspora and bringing a fresh perspective to its present-day consequences. Read More

As communities throughout the South struggle to determine appropriate ways of recognizing Civil War history, Jane Landers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History, and Postdoctoral Fellow Angela Sutton have worked to draw attention to Fort Negley as a site that teaches the tragedy of slavery as well as celebrates the contributions of free and enslaved black people to Nashville and the nation’s history. Read More

Vanderbilt’s Slave Societies Digital Archive hosted scholars from around the world for its third Digital Humanities and the History of Slavery workshop at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library. Read More

A new exhibit at the Wond’ry showcasing the work of Vanderbilt’s Slave Societies Digital Archive will feature some unusual pieces of digital preservation: 3D-printed replicas of significant artifacts. Read More

A digital hub to be housed at Michigan State University will link Vanderbilt's Slave Societies Digital Archive to eight other digital collections of slave records around the country. Read More