Willow Hill Heritage and Renaissance Center

The Willow Hill Heritage and Renaissance Center in collaboration with the Georgia Southern University Libraries and the Department of History will increase digitization and ensure greater accessibility to its collection of 15,000 African American funeral programs. The project will support two paid student interns and a paid community archives manager to digitize, describe, and upload funeral programs to the Digital Commons at Georgia Southern, an open-access online repository. Interns will receive training in scanning techniques and creating metadata for each document, which often contain supplemental information not available elsewhere, such as workplace, education history, church affiliation, and organization membership. Staff will mentor the student interns for future jobs as professional museum personnel. The project provides a training opportunity for students and generates a significant increase in access to this unique collection of primary source materials.