East Tennessee Public Communications Corporation (Appalachian African American Cultural Center)

The Appalachian African American Cultural Center will improve the care of its collections, while developing the skills and capacity to sustain its work to preserve and interpret the history of an eight-county region in the coalfields of Southwestern Virginia. In partnership with a regional archivist, the center will catalog and rehouse its collections. The center will create finding aids and partner with the University of Tennessee Knoxville's School of Information Sciences to digitize items, standardize project metadata, and format them for public access through an online platform. The East Tennessee History Museum will work with the center to create an exhibition and community engagement plan. Project activities will also include the creation of in-house and mobile exhibitions and educational outreach materials to interpret the collections for residents, schools, colleges, and organizations in the region.