African American Newspapers and Periodicals

PURPOSE: The purpose of this data collection is to make more visible the corpus of news produced by and for African Americans by creating an open, freely available directory of African American newspapers and periodicals (print, microfiche, digitized, and born digital).

SCOPE: This is a field-wide collaborative effort. To succeed, we need participation from libraries, archives, and museums of all sizes, types, and statures. Whether you have one page or full runs of titles, your content matters and we need your help to make this content visible!

By "Newspaper and Periodical" we are deliberately opening the door to you to define what that means. If it is a published text/image piece that circulated to an audience of any size in a newspaper or periodical form, we are happy for you to include it. We are not extending to A/V news in this data collection effort (though we may in subsequent efforts!).

DATA COLLECTION DATES: August 18-Sept 30, 2017.

Please complete this survey as many times as necessary to represent the titles your institution has in its collections by or before September 30, 2017. A full, printable list of the survey questions is available at https://educopia.org/publications. If you have any questions, please contact courtney (at) educopia.org for further information.

PLEASE NOTE: There is a fantastic 1998 bibliography by our project advisor James Danky (Bibliography of African American Newspapers and Periodicals published by Harvard University, ISBN 0674007883). It chronicles more than 6,500 African American titles in print and microfilm at libraries, archives, and museums. It will provide you with a lot of the title-specific information you will want as you fill out the survey. 

Through this project, we will build upon and compliment this monumental work via creating a new, open, searchable digital resource that chronicles as fully as possible the print, microfilm, digitized, and born-digital collections of African American Newspapers and Periodicals. 

This survey is conducted by the Educopia Institute, in partnership with the Digital Public Library of America. For more information about the project, including where the registries will be published, please visit http://educopia.org/research/margins.