by Mindy Jarrett, Digital Projects Assistant
Hello, researchers! I’m Mindy Jarrett, Amistad Research Center’s new digital projects assistant. My position falls under the Research Services department, which means that many of my digital responsibilities pertain to making collection items accessible to researchers. This part of my position is very important to me: I am a huge advocate for the creation of digital collections to provide better access to primary source materials.
I’m a New Orleans native, and I am fascinated by anything and everything related to New Orleans’ history. I received a bachelor of arts in English and a master of arts in public history from the University of New Orleans. During graduate school, I worked on Freedom on the Move, a digital repository that contains tens of thousands of newspaper advertisements placed by enslavers seeking the return of fugitives from slavery, and I was editorial assistant for The Journal of African American History.
My work focus so far has concentrated on the Ed Pincus Film Collection, which contains almost 90 hours of 16-millimeter film from Natchez, Mississippi in 1965. Filmmakers Ed Pincus and David Neuman produced two civil rights-era documentaries with the footage: Black Natchez (1967) and Panola (1970). Many of Amistad’s staff have worked on this collection since it was donated in 2002. ARC Curator of Moving Images and Recorded Sound Brenda Flora digitized the footage through a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources; and archival assistant Khalif Birden compiled tons of detailed metadata for each video. Finally, I combined these resources–the videos and their metadata–and uploaded the final product to Louisiana Digital Library. You can now see all 242 videos in our collection on LDL.
Images from Amistad’s website, newsletters and blogs cannot be reproduced without permission.