The HistoryMakers

Informedia is partnering with The HistoryMakers on a recently awarded 2003 National Leadership Grant award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Informedia will work with the HistoryMakers in their efforts to develop a full-content and knowledge-based archival search and retrieval system that will allow the display of digital video, audio, and text libraries to occur over local and wide-area networks.

About the HistoryMakers

The HistoryMakers is a national, non-profit educational institution committed to preserving, developing and providing easy access to an internationally recognized, archival collection of thousands of African American video oral histories. Based in Chicago, The HistoryMakers is a video oral history archive committed to making history come alive, making it accessible to the public through its website, digital archive, special events, public programming and, more specifically, through The Historymakers Education Institute and The HistoryMakers Speakers Bureau. In 2002, The HistoryMakers archives were designated a special collection as part of the Illinois State Library System.

The initial goal of The HistoryMakers is to complete 5,000 interviews of both well-known and unsung African American HistoryMakers within the next five years, creating an archive of unparalleled importance and exposing the archival collection to the widest audience possible. As of April 2003, the HistoryMakers archive contains over 500 videotaped oral history interviews. Until the digital archive is assembled, users can sample the archive holdings via The HistoryMakers website. Here, the interviewed HistoryMakers are grouped thematically for ease of use. Each HistoryMaker is featured with a prominent photo, a biography, an archive of photographs from throughout his/her life and video clips from his/her video interview. The uniqueness of this site lies in its interactivity and the type of information offered. The user can see the HistoryMaker live and hear his/her voice, adding a human quality to historical education.

For complete information on The HistoryMakers, visit their web site at http://www.thehistorymakers.com.