About the project

Although the Society's manuscripts catalogers recognized the importance of materials generated by or about groups of "others," the high priority placed by scholars and other researchers in past decades on political, military, and economic topics influenced the scope of identification and description in the cataloging process. Entries for "women" and "slavery" and "freedmen," for example, appeared with some regularity in the old card catalog, but emphasis (and consequently descriptive detail) was more consistently applied to traditional areas of subject interest. As the collection and the card catalog grew, significant materials of African American or gender interest became lost in a virtual sea of index cards, all with the same heading, that told researchers very little if anything about the specific nature of the materials they might find on those subjects. Any researcher entering the Society's reading room with an interest in the history of slavery or some specific subfield within that study area, for instance, would by the 1990s face the daunting task of working through thousands of catalog entries in the hope of finding perhaps a half dozen items that focused squarely on the issue in which he or she was interested.

The late Waverly K. Winfree (1933–1993), long the Society's curator of manuscripts, was the first among our staff to suggest a project to increase access to the rich body of African American materials he knew to be present within the Society's manuscript holdings. As a plan evolved, the Society successfully approached the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding of what was entitled the "African-American Manuscripts Access Project." NEH funding allowed the Society's project staff to accomplish two major goals: creating MARC-formatted automated cataloging records for 250 collections in the Society's manuscript holdings for inclusion in the OCLC database and the Society's own online catalog, along with compiling the first edition of our Guide to African-American Manuscripts in the Collection of the Virginia Historical Society. The guide, published in 1995, provided enhanced access to specific materials by and about African Americans through narrative descriptions of the papers and indications of the exact physical locations within collections of such records. It likewise provided ready evidence of the great wealth of material and information on the lives and careers of African Americans in the commonwealth that the Society possesses and wishes to make available to an international audience of researchers.

With the inauguration of the Society's collections management and online catalog automation project, some two years after the appearance of the guide, Manuscripts Division staff members began to locate even more African American materials in our existing holdings. Added to that was the tremendous, steady flow of new collections into the Society, some of them donated as a direct result of the emphasis the guide evinced of our commitment to preserving and telling African American history. By 2000, with the original guide out of print and a host of potential new entries crying for attention, the Society's staff determined upon preparing a new and greatly revised edition of the guide. That resulting volume, which was increased by 46 percent over the previous edition, provides access to an even more diverse and significant set of records available for research into African American life in Virginia and the nation.

Finally, in 2006 the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities awarded the VHS a grant to process a series of collections with African American content and to create new guide entries for collections received and processed between 2002 and 2006. These entries have been added to an expanded online version of the guide, which will be updated regularly with new entries in the coming years.