University of Minnesota (University of Minnesota Libraries, Dept. of Special Collections & Rare Books)

The University of Minnesota Libraries will use its grant to create the African American Theater History Project, which will address 200 years of African American theater history that has been consistently under documented. The project team will work with stakeholders to build and make accessible a national collection of digital archival material relevant to African American cultural history, including theater, and to create a means of identifying, aggregating, and indexing selected metadata for end-user discovery. Using existing harvesting protocols or Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), the project will gather openly available metadata and make it available for students and researchers through portals such as the Digital Public Library of America.