Digital Libraries

It seems like the digital world is one place where academic historians and public historians are finally coming together. I am running into digital projects more and more in both my teaching and research. Over the past three years or more I have been working to construct my own digital library to make my research in the Mara Region of Tanzania accessible to people there. It is going to be migrated but at least for now here is the link: Mara Cultural Heritage Digital Library 
This has been a entailed a huge learning curve for me and is still far from complete. At least it gives me some idea of the amount of work from all kinds of experts that goes into creating a site like this. But digital technology does open up the possibility of repatriating cultural material back to the region where it came from in a way that was not even imaginable when I did this work in 1995-6.

I am now teaching a class called The History of Ethnic Conflict in which I am finding a wide range of digital sources very helpful. We are studying the Israel/Palestine conflict through a book about Palestinian memory of 1948. It is amazing how many digital archives have grown up around this memory work:

•al-Nakba: the Palestinian “Catastrophe”

•Nakba Archive

•#Nakba Survivor

•Israeli Occupation Archive

•1948 Lest we Forget

•Nakba Film Works

•Jewish Voice for Peace 

•Palestinian Village Histories, R. Davis

–Archive for Birzeit University

•Berzeit University Palestine Archive

–Destroyed Palestinian villages

•The Palestinian Poster Project Archive 

I especially like this last one - an amazing collection of posters, both Palestinian and Israeli.

It is amazing where this field has gone in the last decade and it seems like both Public and Academic Historians should get on the bandwagon or be left in the dust!