Indexing History
In what feels timely but was actually an unplanned juxtaposition of events, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society launches a new project. This comes just days after a gunman claimed nine lives at an historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina. The Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church was built as a result of the abolitionist movement. This interesting news came from the Henry Herald out of Georgia in their article, “Advocates kick-off Freedmen’s Bureau digital indexing project.”
The project involves digitally indexing the names of newly-freed slaves and Civil War refugees cataloged in the National Archives. It is called the Freedmen’s Bureau Project. The effort is a trifold partnership among the genealogy society, FamilySearch and the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
FamilySearch is a Latter-Day Saints nonprofit family history outreach organization dedicated to connecting relatives across generations. The National Museum of African-American History and Culture, which is expected to open in 2016, was established in 2003 by an Act of Congress to become a Smithsonian Institution museum in Washington, D.C.
With any digital archiving project, it is important to remember the value of a solid taxonomy. How the content is classified impacts the findability of your data. Professionals should look for an experienced builder of solid standards-based taxonomies to associate content for appropriate machine-assisted indexing. Access Innovations can provide solutions that are ANSI compliant.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
