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Association of College & Research Libraries

Indiana builds three African American special collections

Grace Jackson-Brown is head librarian of the Black Culture Center Library at Indiana University, Bloomington; e-mail: jacksonb@ucs.indiana.edu

Indiana University (IU) is building three special collections in the humanities with em- phasis on the history and culture of African Americans. The collection trio includes the Black Culture Center Library, the Black Film Center/Archives, and the Archives of African- American Music, History, and Culture.

The IU Black Culture Center Library was born out of the Office of Afro-American Affairs, under the administration of then vice-chancellor Herman Hudson, in 1970. Hudson took notice of a reading room organized primarily by students, and transformed it in 1972 into a Multi-Media Resource Center with upgraded facilities in a renovated sorority house. The Black Culture Center remains in this facility today, but its collection has more than tripled in size. It includes 3,500 monographs on Afri- can-American history and culture; a collection of about 300 audiotape cassettes of speeches, poetry, and music; 70 popular and scholarly journal titles; an information file with more than 1,000 subject headings; and a biography file containing more than 950 biographies. IU Libraries made the Black Culture Center Library its fifteenth branch library in 1991. For more information about the Black Culture Center Library contact the author at (812) 855-3237.

Film Center/Archives

The Black Film Center/Archives is a unique repository of African-American films and related material which began in 1979. The latest addition to the archives, donated in 1993, is the

Peter Davis Collection of outtakes, stills, photographs, and manuscripts. The Davis Collection includes such films as Winnie Mandela, South Africa: The White Laager, Generations of Resistance, and Anatomy of Violence which was made in conjunction with Stokely Carmichael and Allen Ginsburg. The archive owns films spanning the century of independent filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux, Spencer Williams, and Julie Dash. The archive also has holdings of many contemporary Hollywood films, as well as Blaxploitation-era films. In addition to films, the archive owns movie posters, interviews on videotapes, a computerized filmography, and a vertical file of critical articles, stills, film advertisements, and other memorabilia. The Black Film Center/Archives is a part of the IU Department of Afro-American Studies. For more information about the Black Film Center/Archives contact Phyllis Klotman at (812) 855- 6041.

Music, history, and culture

The IU Archives of African-American Music, History, and Culture (AAAMHC) was founded in 1991 with grant assistance from the Ford Foundation. The AAAMHC is a collection with unique materials on African-American popular music and ethnomusicology. Radio producer Lee Bailey donated the tapes from his program “Radioscope,” a digest of 1980s and 1990s interviews and hip hop music. The AAAMHC also owns historical materials on blues and gospel music, photos, manuscripts, and other paper artifacts. Portia Maultsby, director of AAA, is a renowned ethnomusicologist specializing in African-American popular and gospel music and its ties to West Africa. The AAAMHC is a part of the IU Department of Afro-American Studies. For more information call (812) 855-8547.

Although the aforementioned African American Studies collections are each housed in three different locations on the IU Bloomington campus, fundraising efforts are underway to build a new facility which could accommodate all three archives. About $2.5 million in private donations must be raised to match state funding for the new building which will be named the Neal Marshall Black Culture Center. The new center is named after the first African American alumnus of IU, Marcellus Neal, 1895, and the first African American alumna of IU, Frances Marshall, 1919. To make a donation to the Neal Marshall Center, write to the IU Foundation, P.O. Box 500, Showalter House, Bloomington, IN 47402, or call (812) 855-8311.