Indianapolis Public Library's digital collection celebrates and preserves Indy's Black history

The idea for the project came from Gregory Hill, who at the time was the manager of the Lawrence branch. "He (Hill) contacted us hoping to do some public scanning events at Lawrence with the ultimate goal of creating a digital collection that highlighted the black experience in Indianapolis and to add more of these important voices to our overall collection," Duncan said. "We thought this could be a larger program, and so the then manager of Digital Projects, Meaghan Fukunaga and Nichelle Hayes, Librarian for the Center for Black Literature and Culture, turned to the Indianapolis Public Library Foundation for help."

The group was granted the National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant in 2018. They used the funds to create two mobile scanning kits that could quickly turn scans and metadata of items.

What started as three "scan-a-thons," quickly turned into seven, which then turned into the continuation of scanning memories and history for the future of our state's capital.