Community Projects & Collaborations
The Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections regularly collaborates with, supports, and co-creates community and campus projects. Examples of these include:
- The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project. UASC has overseen the development of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive, organizing and describing 10+ years of collected evidence on cases of racially motivated homicides in 14 states between 1930 and 1970.
- The Boston Research Center. The BRC is a digital community history and archives lab hosted at Northeastern and the Boston Public Library, but designed to be a collaborative effort among many organizations in Boston—civic, research, teaching, and cultural heritage—devoted to developing institutional partnerships and fostering community engagement. As a part of the Boston Research Center there are several specific community projects you can learn more about below:
- Boston Phoenix 1974!, a crowdsourced indexing project using Zooniverse as a platform to create an author and subject index 1973–1990. 144,000 index cards were typed by volunteers, we are currently building a searchable database to support research.
- Our Home: An East Boston Community Archiving Project, a collaboration between the Institute for Contemporary Art Boston, Northeastern’s NULawLab, and area nonprofits designed to celebrate East Boston’s past and present activism by hosting history-capturing and storytelling events for residents.
- Boston Public Schools (BPS) Desegregation Project, a multi-archive scanning and collaborative collection-building initiative that complicates the narrative of Boston’s desegregation history, focusing on activism within communities of color.
- Testing partner, Sourcery, an open source, community-based mobile application that expands access to non-digitized archival sources. This project is under development and you can learn more about the nature of the Library and Archives’s collaboration in our blog.