Umbra Search and the Future of Black Digital Platforms

Together, Umbra Search African American History (umbrasearch.org) and the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities (AADHum) initiative at the University of Maryland (aadhum.umd.edu) convened a working meeting on digital collections and platforms focused on African American history and culture. The meeting was held on October, 18, 2018, at the University of Maryland as a pre-conference session for AADHum's "Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black" conference. By convening a group of librarians, archivists, curators, digital humanists, students, technologists, grant-makers, and other stakeholders, we hoped to advance conversations about representation, agency, and value in the context of African American digital collections and platforms. We were particularly interested, through this meeting and through follow up activities, in topics such as broadening the constituencies for black digital collections, ownership and agency in shared collections, as well as beginning and sustaining not only collaborations, but also digital platforms themselves.