Voices of Grambling: Community Engagement and the Building of an Archive

The Voices of Grambling is a multiphase project whose purpose is to preserve and analyze the African American experience in northern Louisiana. The Voices of Grambling initiative was created following two tragedies: the pandemic and the loss of our University Library. Condemned in 2015 due to structural damage and flooding, our university has been without a physical library and has lost over 150,000 items. This considerable loss of information and resources meant that we had to find creative ways to provide humanistic knowledge to our various stakeholder groups. This resulted in a shift to more public-facing, community-based historical work. Over the course of the last five years, we have built: a lecture series open to the community; a departmental resource room with a computing cluster, VR equipment, and mobile podcast studio; over 100 oral histories from a variety of individuals connected to the area (many of which publicly available online); and immersive models of key moments of Grambling’s history.