Library Journal Names ProQuest’s Digitization of NAACP Papers a “Best Reference”
ANN ARBOR, MI, March 18, 2015 – ProQuest’s extraordinary digitization of the archives of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has been named a “Best Reference” by Library Journal. The multi-year collaboration between ProQuest and the NAACP, which completed in 2014, enables researchers and students to easily search, access and explore a chronicle from the front lines of the U.S. civil rights movement. Encompassing nearly 2 million crisp, scanned images of internal memos, legal briefings and direct action summaries from the association’s national, legal and branch offices, The NAACP Papers spans more than six decades of the work of one of the world’s foremost civil rights organizations.
“The content here is astounding in quantity and quality. The image resolution is excellent, even for hand-written items,” said Harvard Librarian Cheryl LaGuardia in her review of the resource for Library Journal. She sums up by calling the resource “An essential acquisition for libraries serving scholars in civil and human rights, American history, criminal justice, social choice and political theory, military history, and sociology. A tremendously significant historical resource.”
Read Library Journal’s entire review of The NAACP Papers here: http://bit.ly/bestrefnaacp.
Library Journal is the leading trade publication for libraries of all types. Its annual Best Reference feature selects the year’s top resources from works deemed outstanding by its team of librarian reviewers. Only a handful are selected from the thousands of works submitted for review each year.
The NAACP Papers is part of ProQuest® History Vault, an initiative to digitize historically rich primary sources that improve research outcomes for scholars and students. ProQuest History Vault also includes The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century, which encompasses digitized documents from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. ProQuest’s research resources also include Historical Black Newspapers, an archive of digitized African-American newspapers, and Black Studies Center, a digital core collection of primary and secondary sources that record and illuminate the Black experience, from ancient Africa through modern times.
ProQuest is world renowned for its digitization of both iconic and unique historical works, from the archives of such major research institutions as the Bodleian, Huntington and British Libraries – which brought the early English world online – to the entire runs of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and dozens of others, creating a mammoth digital news archive that dates from the mid 1700s. Its digitization process is renowned for its crisp images and deep indexing of the contents of each page, yielding a remarkable level of precision and accuracy to support serious research.
To learn more visit www.proquest.com.
About ProQuest (www.proquest.com)
ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information. Key to serious research, the company’s products are a gateway to the world’s knowledge including dissertations, governmental and cultural archives, news, historical collections and ebooks. ProQuest technologies serve users across the critical points in research, helping them discover, access, share, create and manage information.
The company’s cloud-based technologies offer flexible solutions for librarians, students and researchers through the ProQuest®, Bowker®, Dialog®, ebrary®, EBL® and Serials Solutions® businesses – and notable research tools such as the Summon® discovery service, the RefWorks® Flow™ collaboration platform, the Pivot™ research development tool and the Intota™ library services platform. The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices around the world.