Grant allows IU professor to catalog historical Liberian presidential photos

In 2005, Verlon Stone, the coordinator of the IU Liberian Collections Project, was in Liberia at the estate of the country’s longest-serving president, when he and some others pulled out some photos that were in “pretty bad shape” along with other papers from the statesman’s collection.\nThe photographs are historic images from former Liberian President William Tubman’s records, taken during the time of his presidency. The photographs were of meetings and conferences Tubman attended and of leaders Tubman met. They represent a part of the history of Liberia during the African pre- and post-independence era.\nBut due to a lack of funding, some of the photos had to be left behind upon returning to IU, Stone said.\nThe Endangered Archives Programme of the British Library recently presented the Liberian Collections Project with a $76,750 grant to conserve, organize and digitize the 6,500 photographs in Tubman’s collection. The photographs will be made available to the public on the Internet.\nStone said the papers and photographs recovered are the property of the Tubman family and will be returned to the family in Liberia after the conservation and digitization process is complete. \n“We were only allowed to bring materials here because they are in such bad shape,” Stone said. \nIU will keep the digital copies of the photos and copies of the papers on microfilm, Stone added.\nNow, Stone said, the first step is to begin scanning the photos that were first brought back. Other photos that are not as dirty as the first set of photos will be separated out, cleaned and prepared for digitization.\nWhen the digitizing is complete, Stone said, the digital library program in the Herman B Wells Library is developing a Web application that will allow scholars to describe and categorize larger-than-thumbnail-size photographs, which will then go into the digital library program’s largest repository.\n“People anywhere in the world can search for the photos,” Stone said. “The scholarly duty is to make sure these photos are properly described and are made available to as wide an audience as possible.”\nTubman served as Liberia’s 19th president from 1944 until his death in 1971. His presidency was marked by changes in the economic, political and social environment of Liberia, a Western African nation of about 3.3 million people.\n“He was involved in a lot of West African diplomacy and opening up the country to modern development and beginning to expand social and governmental access to the indigenous residents of Liberia,” Stone said. “He was also very important in the diplomacy in both the pre and post colonial period and key in setting up the Organization of African Unity.”\nStone said that adding more photographs and papers of Tubman’s to the Liberian Collection Project “fits well with our work and the Liberia archive collections.”