Bringing Black Life Online

“I came to librarianship with a problem,” says Shaneé Yvette Murrain, director of community engagement at Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). As both an undergraduate at the HBCU Bethune-Cookman University and a master’s student in divinity at Drew University, she couldn’t find primary sources documenting historic Black churches—traditions, women’s leadership, memberships—in digital collections. In her final year, the university’s theological librarian introduced her to the field. “My primary objective for considering the field was to create an open-access database for scholars and laypeople to study Black church history,” she says.

Her first chance came soon after she enrolled in the MLS program at North Carolina Central University, when she got an IMLS-funded role digitizing records connected to the civil rights movement in the state. It was the first of many such digitization projects she’s overseen at various academic libraries in the years since that have made long-overlooked records related to Black life in the United States far more accessible.

After joining DPLA in 2019, she created the Black Women’s Suffrage digital collection, which includes more than 200,000 artifacts focused on the roles and experiences of Black women in suffrage, voting rights, and civic activism between the 1850s and 1960s. Inspired by the centennial of the 19th Amendment and supported by funding from Melinda Gates’s Pivotal Ventures, “the goal of the collection is to elevate Black women’s activism in our national narrative in places where it has been erased,” she says.

Murrain assembled the collection through relationships she forged with a variety of libraries and institutions, reflecting her commitment to rectifying historical inequities in collections—such as the missing records she sought as a student.

“Digital endeavors, including DPLA, are not divorced from questions of race, power, and equity,” she says. “These relationships and collection-development priorities are grounded in inclusivity and consciousness of the history of injustice in libraries and archives. We are working to make African American collections accessible in the DPLA and modeling how our national network can serve as a platform for repair and building reciprocal relationships.”