Umbra Search African American History makes Black History freely available

From a press release:

The University of Minnesota Libraries, in partnership with the Penumbra Theatre Company, is launching Umbra Search African American History, a free and openly available online search tool at www.umbrasearch.org that facilitates broad access to over 400,000 digitized archival materials documenting African American history from more than 1,000 libraries, archives, and cultural heritage institutions across the United States.

“Now out of its beta and testing phase, Umbra Search builds a national corpus of African American works,” said director Cecily Marcus. “No library is able to digitize all of its holdings, but by bringing together materials from all over the country, Umbra Search allows students and scholars to tell stories that have never been told before. Umbra Search partners have amazing collections, and now those materials can sit side by side with related content from a library on the other side of the country.”

Read the entire press release.