Announcing the Collaborative Testing Partners (July 8, 2021)

(East Lansing, MI, July 8, 2021)

As the On These Grounds project moves into its second phase, we are pleased to announce the selection of five institutions as Collaborative Testing Partners. Each of these groups is working to surface the history of slavery at their colleges and university by undertaking a careful examination of their institutional archives and related collections. The partners include:

• Hampden-Sydney College
• Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
• The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• University of Georgia
• Washington and Lee University

The project teams represent significant geographic and institutional diversity which is essential to sufficiently testing a new descriptive model because their holdings will include a wide array of historical events and experiences.

“We are thrilled with this group of testing partners,” explained Sharon Leon, OTG project director. “The teams are each designed to foster the essential collaboration between historians and libraries and archives workers that are necessary to successfully represent this important history. We look forward to working with and learning from each of the partners.”

Over the next year, these institutions will apply the OTG descriptive model to their own collections that represent the history of slavery at their institutions. They will record their experiences with the ontology and form a cross-institutional community of practice to help improve the ontology itself, and the supporting documentation. At the same time, they will undertake the process of clearly and carefully describing the lived experiences of the enslaved people who labored at their colleges and universities.