A Catalyst for Social Activism: The Digital Black Bibliographic Project at Texas A&M University

What can we learn from bibliographies? A proof of concept currently underway at Texas A&M University, the Digital Black Bibliographic Project (DiBB) poses bibliographies as sites of and tools for activism, allowing new fields and communities to quickly categorize and organize themselves. This presentation considers Dorothy Porter’s A catalogue of the African collection in the Moorland Foundation, Howard University Library (1958) and Abdul Al-Kalimat’s The Afro-Scholar Newsletter (1983-91); reviews a historical schism in libraries between bibliographies and subject categorization; and outlines the goals of DiBB, which seeks to diversify the digital cultural record and produce a robust dataset for black cultural research.