Africa Past and Present, the podcast about history, culture, and politics in Africa and the diaspora, is featured on today’s AHA blog. Produced by Matrix and hosted by MSU faculty members Peter Alegi and Peter Limb, Africa Past and Present highlights interesting and significant people, ideas, and discussions in African Studies from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives.

The project team for a new digital curation planning initiative at Michigan State University includes two MATRIX senior staff members: Lisa Schmidt, electronic records archivist at MATRIX and digital preservation analyst for the University Archives & Historical Collections (UAHC), serves as project manager for the initiative, and MATRIX digital librarian Catherine Foley is also part of the project team.

The Michigan State University Digital Curation Planning Project is a collaboration led by the UAHC with the MSU Libraries and MATRIX, and supported by the Office of the Vice Provost of Libraries, Computing and Technology. Anticipated project outcomes include a digital curation plan and guidelines to ensure trustworthy preservation, management, and stewardship of the university’s digital assets and intellectual property. The project team includes MSU archivists, librarians, IT specialists, and digital content managers.

For more information on the MSU Digital Curation Planning Project, visit http://msudcp.archives.msu.edu.

Africa Past and Present is hosted by Michigan State University historians Peter Alegi and Peter Limb and produced by Matrix.

In this 31st episode, part 2 (of 3) in a series on African Diasporas, hosts Peter Alegi and Peter Limb discuss Dr. Robert Vinson’s (History, College of William and Mary) work on the spread of Garveyism in South Africa and its political and cultural impact. Vinson joins the discussion and explains how black men and women in the 1920s and 30s appropriated Garvey’s ideas of racial pride, pan-Africanism, and modernity to sustain themselves and to propel South Africa’s struggle for freedom.

In August the MATRIX/History Department Africa Past and Present podcast, co-hosted by Peter Alegi and Peter Limb, set new records for unique visitors and for total number of visits in a single month. With four months left (and six more shows) in 2009, download stats are already nearly double the downloads from all of 2008. Thanks for listening!

On August 25, Lisa Schmidt, electronic records archivist at MATRIX, attended an e-forum presented by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Great Lakes Region and the State of Michigan at the Michigan Library and Historical Center in Lansing. Keynote speaker Kenneth Thibodeau, Ph.D.. director of the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) at NARA discussed challenges, lessons learned, opportunities and next steps for the ERA program. ERA is NARA’s strategic initiative to preserve and provide long-term access to the uniquely valuable electronic records of the US. Government, and to transition government-wide management of the lifecycle of all records into the realm of e-government. NARA representatives also presented on the agency’s e-records scheduling initiative and its e-records toolkit. In addition, Debra Gearhart, director of Michigan’s State Records Center, provided an overview of the state’s centralized document management system initiative.

Lisa Schmidt, electronic records archivist at MATRIX, participated in the Society of American Archivists (SAA) annual meeting in Austin, Texas, August 12-15. As part of the standing room only session “Building Sustainable Preservation Environments for Born-Digital Records: Three Case Studies,” Ms. Schmidt delivered a presentation entitled “A Sustainable Preservation Plan: The H-Net E-Mail Lists.” The presentation described the results of Schmidt’s research on the preservation of the H-Net e-mail lists, a project funded by NHPRC.

Held jointly with the Council of State Archivists and themed “Sustainable Archives,” the conference offered attendees opportunities in educational sessions, workshops, repository tours, section and roundtable meetings, special SAA business, social events, and networking. SAA is North America’s oldest and largest national archival professional association.

The Women in Science website is a new digital media archive that uses KORA, MATRIX’s digital repository application, to deliver text access to the written works of several women scientists, including the works of the marquise Du Châtelet, and biographies written by leading historians of science.

The website is available through the participation and support of the MSU Department of History, the MSU Lyman Briggs College, and the MSU Libraries.

To visit the Women in Science website, visit http://womeninscience.history.msu.edu/

To learn about KORA, visit http://www2.matrix.msu.edu/kora/

MATRIX in cooperation with MSU’s Department of History and African Studies Center, has won a $750,000 award from the US Department of Education to partner with African scholars to collect oral histories, folklore, and songs from Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania.  Over a four-year period, the African Oral Narratives project will digitize and provide free web access to 20 collections of oral narratives in 16 African languages.  These audio and video materials can be used by students, teachers, and researchers to document indigenous knowledge and democratize history by representing the voices of ordinary men and women often left out of the official written record.

To learn more about the African Oral Narratives project, see MSU News.

A $250,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant will fund a new MATRIX digital library project on Islamic Practices in West Africa.  Four scholars, including MSU’s University Distinguished Professor David Robinson from the Department of History, will conduct research on various aspects of Muslim life in Ghana and Senegal.  Collaborating scholars will conduct video interviews and collect photographs and archival documents.  MATRIX will publish four case studies on the web organized in thematic galleries that will feature each scholar’s research materials and documentation.

Typically intellectual work–like that planned for this project–is published in academic journals most often consulted by content experts and specialists.  In designing this project MATRIX and its scholarly collaborators deliberately chose a web publication outlet in order to ensure broad public access to the content.  As a result, other researchers can use primary-source materials in the digital collection to develop new scholarship.  Teachers can also use the resources in the classroom, for example by having student look at the documents and photographs, and listen to the voices of regular men and women from an important part of the world.

Access to the Islam in West Africa digital collection is free and accessible through the African Online Digital Library (http://aodl.org).

On July 17, Lisa Schmidt, electronic records archivist at MATRIX, attended “Managing the Digital University Desktop,” a Society of American Archivists (SAA) workshop held at the Kellogg Hotel & Conference Center on the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing. Duke University archivist Timothy D. Pyatt led the workshop, which focused on research results and subsequently developed electronic records training tools from the joint University of North Carolina-Duke University Managing the Digital University Desktop (MDUD) project. Practical strategies on training university employees how to manage e-mail and other electronic records were discussed, as well as general issues related to the management of active electronic records. Staff from the MSU Archives and other departments across campus attended, along with archivists and librarians from Wayne State University, Hope College, and the University of Illinois. This workshop was part of a series presented by the Michigan State University Archives and Historical Collections in honor of its 40th anniversary.