NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom, 1909-2009.

NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom, 1909-2009

The largest single collection at the Library of Congress (LOC) is the NAACP Papers, a vast resource into which virtually all civil rights movement scholars have immersed themselves at some point or other.

Now, the LOC introduces NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom, a Web site that should prove insightful and educational for students and the general public and shows the promise to be a useful resource for scholars if the digitization process helps to bring the vast treasure trove of NAACP resources in the LOC onto the Web.

According to the home page of the easily navigable site, the Web resource "presents a retrospective of the major personalities, events, and achievements that shaped the NAACP's history during its first 100 years." Clicking on the NAACP's Interactive Timeline opens a new page with actor Laurence Fishburne as narrator and tour guide. Clicking further (Enter the Timeline) reveals a US map superimposed with clickable dates. Clicking on a date reveals a box that gives details about the event in question and reveals on another map the places where that event had impact.

Under the Exhibition Items tab, a page allows users to click on various documents available for viewing online. The Web site is still a work in progress, but holds considerable promise as a resource that will bring arguably the LOC's most significant collection to a broader public and will show that archives represent far more than dusty boxes held in storage, but rather serve as a repository for what the past can tell us about who we are and who we have wanted to be. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. -- D. C. Catsam, University of Texas of the Permian Basin Reviewed in ACRL's July 2011 CHOICE.