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PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS

AH_DigITalPortal project is dedicated to gathering for Web placement photos, audio transcripts, and photo/copies of rare historical documents, and especially archival notes and manuscripts, that are either inaccessible or for some reason are no longer available in the archives in African countries where their originals were housed. AH_digITalPortal solicits researchers and students of Africa for copies of such manuscripts and other types of relevant primary source documents that they have acquired during the course of their careers so we can convert them into electronic and digital formats and make them readily and freely available to a wider audience of students and researchers.

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African History Digital Document Portal hopes to contribute to solving the problem of the relative paucity on the WEB of historical documents on many themes and topics for teaching and researching African history.

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AH_digiTalPortal provides an avenue for willing scholars and researchers of Africa who have worked on different topics, subjects, and societies to digitally or electronically pool together their many year’s collections of archival notes, documents, and other sources of historical information and put them out on the website.

Interviews on Cassette Tape

Send us a copy of your interview files, collected songs, proverbs, etc. on tape or 

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transcribed, and we will convert them to electronic formats, endeavor to digitize as quickly as possible, and place them on this website where other researchers can access them.

African History DigITal Document Portal

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  • digitizes copies of historical documents that scholars of Africa have acquired during their research or otherwise convert them to electronic format and hosts them

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  • restores alternative access to documents whose originals in the archives are lost, misplaced, or are torn or ruined.

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  • preserves rare and valuable  documents

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  • facilitates public access to otherwise unavailable or inaccessible resources

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  • saves re/searchers the effort, time, cost and risk they would otherwise bear for traveling to the African archives that host originals of these documents

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  • makes private field interviews available to a wide scholarly and interested audience

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  • serves as a service arm that helps in putting to good use for creating and circulating knowledge about Africa some odd historical documents that otherwise sit un-utilized in cabinets, boxes, and drawers.

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  • increases the many sites from where similar documentary sources on the history of Africa can be readily and easily accessed

 

Credits​

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The coordinator wishes to register his appreciation to Professor Ann O’Hear for her encouragement of AH_digITalPortal. First, she turned over to the coordinator, by courier service, three large DHL boxes of photocopies of archival and other historical documents on slavery in Nigeria and on British colonial administration in central Nigeria to include in the digital collections. AH_digiTalPortal is converting them into electronic and digital formats and will be hosted on the portal as they are ready. Second, she made African History Digital Document Portal a permanent repository for the archive of the scholarly work she has carried out during her long and very productive academic career as a teacher and researcher in the UK, Nigeria, and the US.
 
Sincere appreciation also goes to Gracy Michelle Go, the pioneer research assistant to Professor Kolapo on this project, whose help with indexing made the 2020 inaugural outing of this Website possible and to Gavin Hughes, the summer 2021 research assistant who helped to incorporate the capabilities of web dynamic pages into the website, in addition to the indexing work he did.

 

Finally, the coordinator wishes to acknowledge and thank the College of Arts, University of Guelph, ON, Canada, for funding the above-mentioned 2020 and 2021 summer research assistantships.

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