Dataverse Publishes Houghton Library's Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom Data Collection

The Harvard Dataverse repository and Houghton Library are proud to announce the publication of the Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom (SAEF) Data Collection, an open access research dataset representing over 1200 items in Houghton Library's SAEF collection. This dataset represents Harvard Library’s first major endeavor to represent a significant Harvard Library collection as data, which will support research methodologies that employ computational analysis of images, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) text, and machine-generated transcriptions of manuscript materials.

The SAEF Data Collection was created by a joint team with members from Houghton Library, Harvard Library's Open Scholarship and Research Data Services, Harvard Library’s Digital Scholarship Program, Harvard Library's Imaging Services, and the Harvard Dataverse data curation and repository development teams. This work was supported by a Harvard Library Advancing Open Knowledge Grant in 2021. 

The SAEF project brings together a curated collection of materials at Houghton Library ranging from the Early Republic through Reconstruction. In the summer of 2020, under the leadership of former Digital Collections Program Manager Dorothy Berry, Houghton Library put a year-long pause on its digitization projects to focus on curating a digital collection of materials relating to African American history and culture. Houghton’s collections span from the earliest written materials on papyrus to cutting edge 21st-century book arts, and while its digitization program has run the gamut, it had not historically centered Black history. This project was a first foray into actively sharing the library’s rich collections related to Black experiences from the 18th through early 20th century. The collection of over 1,160 digitized objects, as well as pedagogical materials, contextualizing essays, and the SAEF Data Collection, can all be found on the SAEF Curiosity Site.

The SAEF data curation work was provided by Harvard Dataverse repository's fee-based curation services and is one of several recent paid curation projects, including the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon collection. The Harvard Dataverse curation team, in partnership with Harvard Library provides fee-based curation services to researchers around the world who are depositing data into The Harvard Dataverse Repository.

For more information about the SAEF Data Collection or about building research datasets from library collections, please reach out to Ceilyn Boyd at cboyd@iq.harvard.edu. For more information about the SAEF Collection, contact Christine Jacobson at christine_jacobson@harvard.edu. For information about Harvard Dataverse curation services, view the offerings at Curation and Data Management Services or contact support@dataverse.harvard.edu.

Images from the SAEF Data Collection. Links to full sources:

• "The first colored senator and representatives, in the 41st and 42nd Congress of the United States"
• "Fifteenth Amendment Celebration! ; to be held May 4, '70 at Nashville"
• "Truth, Sojourner, d. 1883. A.L.s. to [Thomas Ollive Mabbott]; Battle Creek, 1 Dec 1876"