The Library is honored to be a part of the “On These Grounds” project, a collaboration funded by the Mellon Foundation to improve description and discovery around the history of enslavement at universities.
The excerpt below comes from a story published in UVA Today on Sept. 1, 2020. Written by Anne E. Bromley.
As U.S. institutions of higher education, especially in the South and East, have been researching and publicly discussing their histories with slavery for a dozen years or so, it has become clear that it would be beneficial to make this documentation more easily accessible to scholars, students, genealogists and the public.
Despite the similarities of record types, information sources and data elements, each institution is taking its own, often duplicative approach to its history. Producing a common, shared approach to documenting, describing and organizing the data derived from the archival records relating to these histories, a new digital project, “On These Grounds,” supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will help expand researchers’ understanding of the lives and experiences of the enslaved across these institutional contexts and extend the possibility of search and discovery across collections. The project could also enable people doing genealogy to find out more about their ancestors.