ProQuest Releases Digital NAACP Content Ahead of Schedule

ANN ARBOR, Mich., June 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The work of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and ProQuest to create broad, digital access to the archives of the venerable civil rights organization is progressing far ahead of schedule. ProQuest released the second in a series of six NAACP modules for libraries and researchers four months earlier than anticipated. ProQuest® History Vault's The NAACP's Major Campaigns: Education, Voting Housing, Employment, Armed Forces provides electronic access to records documenting the organization's tireless fight for civil rights from 1916-1965. Earlier this year, files from the group's Board of Directors and Annual Conferences, as well as text of major speeches and national staff records, were made available electronically.  

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"It's hard to imagine any serious research on the civil rights movement that could be conducted without consulting this collection," said civil rights icon and NAACP Chairman Emeritus Julian Bond. Dr. Bond spoke about the monumental project to open avenues for research and preserve the NAACP's valuable records and detailed his personal experiences in the movement to earn equal rights for all Americans at the American Library Association's Annual Conference, June 25th in Anaheim.  

The NAACP archives are part of the rapidly expanding ProQuest® History Vault, which chronicles the American experience.  Additional History Vault modules already online and available to researchers include:

• The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century, comprised of documents ranging from the founding of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs at the close of the 19th century to the riots that followed the verdict in the Rodney King brutality case in the 1990s;
• Slavery and the Law, which includes petitions on the subject of race and slavery to State legislatures and Southern county courts -- some of the most revealing documentation in existence on the functioning of the slave system
• Vietnam War and Foreign Policy, 1960-1975, covering U.S. involvement in the region from the early days of the Kennedy administration to the final resolution at the Paris Peace Talks and the evacuation of U.S. troops in 1973

Documents in History Vault are available for remote study and are supported by rich, intuitive search technology.  Original archival arrangement schemes are preserved and PDFs of the original sources replicate the user experience of browsing through archive boxes, providing an unparalleled research experience for students and faculty who would otherwise be unable to access materials held at geographically-dispersed archives.

History Vault's NAACP archives are part of ProQuest's vast portfolio of products that provide diverse viewpoints and lenses on news.  The company's rich research resources also include Historical Black Newspapers, an archive of digitized African-American newspapers, Jewish Newspapers, a developing archive of historical Jewish American papers, and Black Studies Center, a digital core collection of primary and secondary sources that record and illuminate the Black experience, from ancient Africa through modern times.

To learn about ProQuest's mission to make serious research more productive and powerful, visit www.proquest.com.

About ProQuest (www.proquest.com)

ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information.  Key to serious research, the company has forged a 70-year reputation as a gateway to the world's knowledge – from dissertations to governmental and cultural archives to news, in all its forms.  Its role is essential to libraries and other organizations whose missions depend on the management and delivery of complete, trustworthy information.

ProQuest's massive information pool is made accessible in research environments that accelerate productivity, empowering users to discover, create, and share knowledge.

An energetic, fast-growing organization, ProQuest includes the ProQuest®, Bowker®, Dialog®, ebrary®, and Serials Solutions® businesses and notable research tools such as the RefWorks® and Pivot™ services, as well as its' Summon® web-scale discovery service.  The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices around the world.

SOURCE ProQuest