NEWS

Library Journal Names ProQuest’s Digitisation of NAACP Papers a “Best Reference”

Collaboration of ProQuest and NAACP created fully searchable, online resource
that LJ says is “essential” for study of the U.S. civil rights movement

ProQuest’s extraordinary digitisation of the archives of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has been named a “Best Reference” by Library Journal. The multi-year collaboration between ProQuest and the NAACP, which completed in 2014, enables researchers and students to easily search, access and explore a chronicle from the front lines of the U.S. civil rights movement. Encompassing nearly 2 million crisp, scanned images of internal memos, legal briefings and direct action summaries from the association’s national, legal and branch offices, The NAACP Papers spans more than six decades of the work of one of the world’s foremost civil rights organizations. 

“The content here is astounding in quantity and quality. The image resolution is excellent, even for hand-written items,” said Harvard Librarian Cheryl LaGuardia in her review of the resource for Library Journal. She sums up by calling the resource “An essential acquisition for libraries serving scholars in civil and human rights, American history, criminal justice, social choice and political theory, military history, and sociology. A tremendously significant historical resource.”

Read Library Journal’s entire review of The NAACP Papers here: http://bit.ly/bestrefnaacp

Library Journal is the leading trade publication for libraries of all types. Its annual Best Reference feature selects the year’s top resources from works deemed outstanding by its team of librarian reviewers. Only a handful are selected from the thousands of works submitted for review each year. 

The NAACP Papers is part of ProQuest® History Vault, an initiative to digitise historically rich primary sources that improve research outcomes for scholars and students.  ProQuest History Vault also includes The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century, which encompasses digitised documents from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. ProQuest’s research resources also include Historical Black Newspapers, an archive of digitised African-American newspapers, and Black Studies Center, a digital core collection of primary and secondary sources that record and illuminate the Black experience, from ancient Africa through modern times.

ProQuest is world renowned for its digitisation of both iconic and unique historical works, from the archives of such major research institutions as the Bodleian, Huntington and British Libraries – which brought the early English world online – to the entire runs of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and dozens of others, creating a mammoth digital news archive that dates from the mid 1700s. Its digitisation process is renowned for its crisp images and deep indexing of the contents of each page, yielding a remarkable level of precision and accuracy to support serious research.

www.proquest.com