In September 2023, Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives (MOBA) launched at Artists and Archivists in Dialogue as a user-friendly portal to access the province’s Black collections. In January, 2024, Dr. Cheryl wrote about the event on her blog. Since then, here’s what the MOBA team has been up to:
- While we wait on additional funding, we want you to know that we are committed to continuing our efforts to make all Ontario’s Black archival collections searchable and discoverable. Stay tuned for more!
- We are in the interview phase of our project and so far the interviews have yielded incredible results. Once completed, we will analyze the data in relation to our digital survey and will provide another update on our major findings later this year.
- In partnership with Dr. Reem El Asaleh, Director of The Lab of Excellence in Digital Asset Management (LED) and Neal Bilow of Terentia, MOBA is building a digital asset management system (DAM) prototype system to revolutionize MobaProjects.ca by transforming its current digital infrastructure into a dynamic, future-ready platform ready to store, preserve, and display MOBA’s invaluable research data and forthcoming archival treasures. We are aiming to share this exciting new feature later this spring.
- In April, MOBA, LED, Terentia, and a special guest from the US will take part in a hybrid speaker event at TMU on digital archives and cultural preservation. More details to come soon!
- If you haven’t checked it out already, Black Creative Lab has a YouTube series called “Remixing the Archive” where we feature conversations with Seika Boye (dancer and scholar), Anique Jordan (visual artist and creative), Lisa Cox (actor and acting professor), and Sierra King (artist and digital archivist). Please follow and like our digital content.