In celebration of Juneteeth, DARTH is excited to announce the launch of the new portal for the Black Teacher Archive. Co-conceptualized and led by Professors Jarvis Givens and Imani Perry, and directed by Micha Broadnax, the Black Teacher Archive (BTA) is a post-custodial archive of publications by professional organizations of African American educators known as Colored Teachers Associations (CTAs). The new portal is hosted by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and provides open access to almost 2,000 journals, books, proceedings, and similar materials published over the course of a century, from 1884 to 1987.

As the team writes, the project originated in 2018 via Givens’ and Perry’s shared scholarly interest in CTAs. With funding fron the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, their team supported the digitization of more than 50,000 pages from almost 100 institutions and the cecntralization of the created records, scans and OCR at Harvard Library. In 2023, they launched the first version of the portal through Harvard’s CURIOSity portal.

For the last year, DARTH has been working with the BTA team on a new iteration of the portal, launching today, that builds on this initial work.

Integrated faceted and full-text search

The new portal’s major achievement is an integrated faceted and full-text search powered by the open source search engine Elasticsearch. The sophisticated keyword search combines the specificity of exact searching (via quotation marks) with the flexibility of ranked-relevance fuzzy search. With exact searching, users can focus in on particular organizations, events, or article titles, for example. With fuzzy search, the net is cast wider, improving search across parts of speech, typos, and OCR error. In addition, this flexibility is especially helpful for names, which may appear in different variations both across and within publications. Searching for pioneering educator and civil right activist Mary McLeod Bethune, for example, turns up uses of her full name, her honorific (“Mrs. Bethune”), and Bethune-Cookman College, which started in part as the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls tha Bethune founded in 1904.

IIIF Viewer with Highlighted Queries

Pages for individual objects in the archive feature a new IIIF viewer called Triiiceratops, developed by DARTH software engineer David Flood. This viewer is designed to be lightweight, customizable, and easily dropped into any HTML page or frontend framework. For the portal, we’ve tailored the viewer to focus on the full-text search results by pairing hit highlighting with canvas highlighting. In the left panel, search hits are highlighted within text excerpts, while on the page scans, yellow overlays map directly to the text coordinates. Both full-text search queries and page IDs are stored in the URL, allowing users to easily share or bookmark their findings, such as this speech introducing Bethune to the Southeastern Federation of Colored Women, as transcribed in the November 1942 issue of the Mississippi Educational Journal.

Bookmarks

Speaking of bookmarks, registered users of the portal can build lists of saved publications and pages. They can then browse these lists in two ways. First, they can select the list as a filter on the search page, where they can focus further in on particular states, publications, or other facets. Second, they can browse all of their list’s bookmarked pages in a IIIF collection.

Lists can be either private or “unlisted,” which means users can share them with others via a custom link. This latter option powers the Faces of the Archive feature on the homepage, which highlights important figures from the history of Black education such as Bethune, Thurgood Marshall, and Edna Colson.

Curated Features with integrated archive content

Along with powerful search for researchers, the new portal also provides curated features, created by the BTA team, that offer different entrypoints into the history of Black education in the US. The pages in About Colored Teachers Associations explain the origins of these professional organizations and assemble information about their trajectories—such as name changes, personnel, and headquarters locations—in different states. The Black Education Timeline, built with Timeline.Js, records and contextualizes the evolution of Black educgtional institutions and traditions alongside historical events and legal cases.

Finally, there is a group of exhibits, with more to come, curated by a raneg of contributors and put together by research assistant Erica Buddington. These exhibits are fully integrated with the archive portal, highlighting specific journal issues and articles with links to the object pages. Among other topics, these exhibits draw on Givens’ and Perry’s recent scholarship to explore topics and themes in the archive.

Feedback welcome!

We invite you to explore the new portal, exhibits, and additional content like curricular resources. The project will continue to grow, and we welcome feedback to help improve the user experience.