This post was written by Lee Ann Potter and Kaleena Black of the Library of Congress.
Earlier this month, Michael Apfeldorf’s post “Expanding Student Understanding of Slavery in America by Exploring an Arabic Muslim Slave Narrative” introduced blog readers to the Omar Ibn Said Collection. This post adds details about the collection and a related pilot program we launched with two local high schools.
Shortly after the Library of Congress acquired the collection, plans for making it accessible to researchers began, including its digitization, a related symposium, and associated press releases. The Library also decided to try something new. Members of the Learning and Innovation team contacted two local high schools with active media production programs for students and asked whether they might be interested in learning about this collection and helping us tell its story through film. Fortunately, they said yes, and between October and early February we worked with 13 sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and 3 teachers, from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, MD, and Richard Wright Public Charter School for Journalism and Media Arts in Washington, DC.
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