Case Western Reserve University has partnered with The HistoryMakers to provide students, faculty and staff with access to thousands of African-American oral history videos, including information highlighting the university and its alumni.
CWRU is the first organization in Cleveland to have access to the collection. The year-long subscription is funded by the university’s Office for Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunity and the Kelvin Smith Library.
“This is a valuable resource for our students, faculty and staff,” said Marilyn S. Mobley, vice president of the Office for Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunity. “It was fascinating to see that there are at least 15 alumni from—and more than 100 stories about—Case Western Reserve in the collection.”
The collection will be a relevant resource for numerous academic programs, particularly the newly established African and African-American studies minor and the social justice minor. It is the world’s largest African-American oral-history video archive with more than 2,000 videotaped interviews, 300 of which have already been digitized. In total, the collection plans to digitize more than 5,000 videos.
The CWRU community can access the digital material at researchguides.case.edu/databases.
Non-CWRU community members need a subscription to access the digital library and streaming videos through thehistorymakers.org, but they can visit Kelvin Smith Library during regular business hours to use the university’s subscription.