The footage was discovered as part of a donation to the Home & Amateur Movies Collection in the Walter J. Brown Media & Peabody Awards Archive. It is part of the Pebble Hill Plantation Footage.

If links become available to view the segments, we’ll update this post with links.

An exciting new initiative began today when the Digital Public Library of America launched its first six service and content hubs. The hubs promise to unleash millions of historical, scientific and cultural documents from many of America’s national and state institutions, making them easily searchable as digital records to anyone with an Internet connection.

In Georgia, the Digital Library of Georgia serves as the regional hub. The DLG is an initiative of GALILEO, Georgia’s statewide virtual library, and it is based at the University of Georgia Libraries.

The Digital Public Library of America’s common platform also provides an open programming interface and metadata structure that will allow for free and innovative use of these materials by educators, researchers, programmers and the public. Taking part in the launch as the first service hubs are state and regional libraries in Massachusetts, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Minnesota and the Mountain West region.

Driven by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Knight Foundation has supported the project since 2011 as part of its library initiative that aims to reimagine libraries as centers for community engagement and digital access. For us, the goal of Digital Public Library of America aligns with Knight’s strong belief that informed communities are able to best determine their own interests. And we are thrilled to be part of a project that furthers this strong vision of engagement.

The Digital Library of Georgia is a massive aggregation in its own right with one million objects in more than 200 collections from 60+ institutions and 100+ state government agencies. It also provides a portal to two jewel collections: this Civil Rights Digital Library and the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries’ Civil War Portal.

Associate Director of the Digital Library of Georgia and DPLA service-hub Director Sheila McAlister is excited to see what happens when Georgia’s content mixes with other local and national collections when DPLA launches in April. “Users all over the country are going to be exposed to content that tells the story of the country in a way they haven’t been able to do before,” she explained, saying she sees  ”so much potential to help fill out that nuanced history of our country.”

The Digital Library of Georgia‘s first exhibit for the Digital Public Library of America will focus on American social movements and feature some of the collection’s unique civil rights content. Current partners span libraries, archives, museums and educational institutions of every size.

Below, McAlister talks more about her hope for the project’s future and what she sees as major challenges, including metadata alignment across the diverse institutions involved, access to materials that are not in the public domain, and keeping project momentum and interest going so that the general public becomes just as excited about digital library as librarians are.

Could tell me about your organization and how you became involved with the Digital Public Library of America?

S.M: The Digital Library of Georgia is the cultural heritage digitization initiative for the state of Georgia. We work with libraries, archives, museums,and other institutions of education, and we help them take their important historical content and put it online for everybody all over the country to use—all over the world, even.

What’s unique about the collections that you have at the Digital Library of Georgia?

S.M: Aside from the wonderful Georgia-related content, the Digital Library of Georgia also is the host of two other projects that have nationwide import, and that would be the Civil Rights Digital Library, which at its heart has about 30 hours of raw news footage of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. And then we’re also the host for the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries’ Civil War Portal. And so we’re hoping to bring all of that content along with our amazing Georgia content into national digital library.

Do you think those will be part of any of the first exhibitions for the Digital Public Library? can you give us a preview of what will be there?

S.M: As you know, each of the hubs is going to be doing an exhibit, and our exhibit is going to be on social movements and activism in the United States, so I imagine that we’re going to be featuring a lot of civil rights content.

So what local benefits do you think that your position as a service hub will end up providing?

S.M: The local benefits will be that we’re able to work with institutions that are really strapped for resources to help them bring forward their own content and share it with a larger community. And one of the things that we’re really hoping to do is work with smaller libraries in the state, so I think to me that’s particularly exciting, given the kinds of budget stresses that libraries in our state are having.

Can you give any indication of the number of different historical societies, libraries, groups that you all serve as a hub for right now?

S.M: I believe we serve as a hub for about 100 different institutions. That includes all three of the portals. Plus, we also work with over 100 agencies of the state government through our Georgia government publications database.

What different types of libraries and societies do you work with?

S.M: We work with everything from large research libraries—for example,  Emory, University of Georgia, Georgia State, Georgia Tech—to small, public libraries. For example, we’ve done a number of projects with the Middle Georgia Archives, which is in Macon and is one of the Knight communities. We’ve also worked with historical societies, as well. A couple of the bigger ones like the Atlanta History Center and the Georgia Historical Society, both of which will be contributing content.

What affect do you think the Digital Public Library launch in April will have nationally—for libraries, for users, for other information providers?

S.M: I see it as a really exciting thing for libraries. The users all over the country are going to be exposed to content that tells the story of the country in a way they haven’t been able to do before. I think that only about 40 out of the 50 states have state-wide digital library initiatives, and there’s just really not one place where people can go to get content that really covers a lot of the different communities and histories. And DPLA is going to be that place. I’m really excited to see it grow in the future. There’s so much potential to help fill out that nuanced history of our country.

What challenges are you anticipating going forward after the launch, as the project grows and expands?

S.M: Some of the challenges are dealing with materials that are not in the public domain. So, that’s definitely something that I think is on the minds of not only the hubs, but also the project as a whole—how do we balance that and get people the kind of content that they want. I think another challenge is keeping the momentum going, and again, with tight budgets, our own state archives suffered really bad cuts over the last  year. Once the exciting big splash is over, how do we keep that momentum going and keep the interest going?

I hear that you’re the metadata brain behind the Digital Public Library.

Well, that’s exaggerating a little bit. I enjoy good, thorough metadata.

How has that experience been—trying to get all the metadata from all these really different types of portals aligning?

S.M: It’s a challenge, and I think really part of the challenge is balancing a boutique approach with getting as much out there as possible. So, we’re kind of working our way through that, and I think one of the things that we did with some of our constituent libraries was put a lot of effort into describing that content really, really well—from providing people with historic grounding in what’s going on in these clips, which are often unannotated; you have to go through and identify the people. It’s not useful to people unless they have that background information. For that project, we were able to do that. We’re not able to do that with all the projects, so we have to find that sort of sweet spot between the two.

For me, that’s challenging, because I wish I could do everything to that level, but the reality is that not everything can be that way. So we’ve been working a lot on automating and just thinking of new and different, faster ways to do things. I’m also really excited about some of the potential that the project is going to have to look at things like data, which at my institution, we love to do, but given the massive, massive amounts of data, and being on the ground, we don’t necessarily have the time to do that. And I’m really excited to see how the project leverages all of that together. And I’m hoping to learn new things and bring them back to Georgia’s digital library.

So what’s your hope for the Digital Public Library project going forward? What’s your big-vision dream?

S.M: I would like to see, again, more states and regions represented. I would like to really see the general public get behind it and embrace it and also see the value of libraries, which I think unfortunately they sometimes don’t do.

So how does that happen? How do we get the public to embrace it? Is that the library’s job?

S.M: I think it’s a grassroots kind of thing. Obviously, in the library community, there’s a lot of talk about the Digital Public Library. I don’t think it’s crossed into the general public as much, although I will say we did actually have a few individuals who were super excited about having their own personal items included in the archive. So, we’ve got to get the larger community, and I’m hoping that things like these exhibits—and maybe working with teachers and that kind of thing—that’s the way you hook people in.

By Annie Schutte, a librarian, teacher and consultant for Knight Foundation

Scheduled for 2-6 p.m. Wednesday, April 17, the event will spotlight faculty members who have formed innovative collaborations with the Special Collections Libraries and showcase the exhibits and collections of the libraries.

Toby Graham, deputy university librarian, will welcome guests in the auditorium (Room 285), at 2p.m.

“UGA faculty have integrated Special Collections holdings and spaces into their teaching in exciting and productive ways during the Russell Building’s first year,” Graham said. “We welcome faculty members to the open house to hear examples from their colleagues and to consider how the libraries can help them to enrich their own research and instruction.”

The event will begin with a panel discussion from 2-3 p.m., followed by an offering of 30-minute breakout sessions further exploring archivist/faculty partnerships from 3-4 p.m. The second half of the event will feature tours of the galleries and 30,000-square-foot collections vault; opportunities to meet staff, ask questions, and discuss future collaborations; and enjoy light refreshments from Big City Bread.

To attend, University faculty and graduate students providing instruction should register online at http://www.libs.uga.edu/scl/facultyrsvp.html. For more information about the event contact Jan Levinson, outreach archivist at the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, (706) 542-5788, jlevinso@uga.edu.

The 28mm home movie, part of the Pebble Hill Plantation Film Collection (c. 1917-c. 1976), was donated to the University of Georgia Libraries’ Walter J. Brown Media Archives, the only public institution in Georgia devoted entirely to preserving unique moving images and sound from the state,  last year.  Pebble Hill, a hunting plantation located just outside Thomasville, was bought in 1896 by Howard Melville Hanna of Cleveland, Ohio, as a winter home. In 1901 he gave the property to his daughter, Kate Hanna Ireland, and her children Livingston and Elizabeth “Pansy” Ireland.  Pebble Hill’s trustees donated the family’s films to the Media Archives in order to preserve their unique scenes of the family and property.

“It is believed to be the only existing moving image of a baseball game between teams made up of African-American employees on Southern hunting plantations.  The precise date of the film is unknown, but based on photographs of Pebble Hill teams and from other films wound with this film, it appears to have been made around 1919,” said Margaret Compton, moving image archivist at UGA. The opposing team in the game is from Chinquapin Plantation, also situated just outside Thomasville.

More here: http://news.uga.edu/releases/article/earliest-known-plantation-baseball-game-film-discovered/

http://www.libs.uga.edu/media/

Born in England, Russell was a stage star from a young age in Canada before moving to New York to perform on Broadway. By the 1880s, she was one of the most popular and successful stage actresses—a contemporary of Ethel Barrymore, Edwin Booth and Maude Adams. In 1905, she traveled to England where she originated the role of Barbara Undershaft in George Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara.”

The films are part of the Pebble Hill Plantation Film Collection (c. 1917-c. 1976), which includes Georgia’s earliest home movies and were donated to the Brown Archives last year. Pebble Hill, just outside Thomasville, was bought in 1896 by Howard Melville Hanna of Cleveland, Ohio, as a winter home. In 1901, he gave the property to his daughter, Kate Hanna Ireland, and her children Livingston and Elizabeth “Pansy” Ireland. Pebble Hill’s trustees donated the family’s films to the archives in order to preserve their unique scenes of the family and property.

“Twenty-eight mm film is an early home movie and industrial/educational film format that was on the market in the U.S. from 1913 through the late 1920s,” said Margie Compton, a film archivist at UGA. “Thankfully, collections like this which contain 28mm films are still coming to light and we are learning more about the format. We work with Colorlab in Rockville, Md., to provide us with new film 35mm preservation prints and digital masters so the public can continue to enjoy the films for another 100 years.”

Compton consulted a privately published history of the Hanna family. The history mentioned that the Irelands met Russell through a mutual friend, and that Russell’s home in Maine was later bought by Livingston Ireland. When one of the home movies showed a couple at a shingled cottage in a setting that looked like Maine, Compton focused on whether the couple was Russell and her actor husband, Oswald Yorke. Online images from the New York Public Library and from the archives at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla. (where Russell spent her last years), indicated that it was probably Russell in the films.

Compton traveled to the Olin Library at Rollins College and showed the film to archivists Wenxian Zhang and Darla Moore, who preserve Russell’s papers and photographs, and to theater professor Jennifer Cavenaugh, who has researched and written about Russell. They confirmed that the couple in the film was Russell and Yorke, probably in the summer of 1917 or 1918 at Russell’s Maine home. They had never seen moving images of Russell.

For more information about the Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection, see http://www.libs.uga.edu/media/.

For information about the archives at Rollins College, see the archives website, http://www.rollins.edu/library/find/findarchives.html.

For the Annie Russell Theatre’s schedule and to purchase tickets, see http://www.rollins.edu/annierussell/.

For more information on Pebble Hill Plantation, see www.pebblehill.com.

Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream (March 20) – In 23 seasons with the Milwaukee and Atlanta Braves, Henry Aaron quietly rewrote baseball’s record books. Filmmaker Mike Tollin’s powerful, inspiring portrait from 1995 focuses particularly on Aaron’s grace, dignity and focus in the face of hate mail and even death threats as he closed in on Babe Ruth’s all-time career home run record of 714 in 1974.

Peabody Awards
The Peabody Awards, the oldest in broadcasting, are considered among the most prestigious and selective prizes in electronic media. The awards recognize excellence and meritorious work by radio and television stations, networks, webcasters, producing organizations and individuals. The 16-member Peabody Board is a distinguished panel of television critics, industry practitioners and experts in culture and the arts. Selection is made by the Board following review by special screening committees of UGA faculty, students, and staff. For more information regarding the Peabody Awards program, visit www.peabodyawards.com.

The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection is one of the largest broadcasting archives in the country, with over 250,000 titles preserved in film, audio and videotape, and other recording formats. The only public archive in Georgia devoted solely to the preservation of audiovisual materials, the Brown Media Archives holds programs dating from the 1920s to the present day. For more information, see http://www.libs.uga.edu/media/index.html or visit our exhibit space in UGA’s Richard B. Russell Special Collections Library.

Contact: Noel W. Holston, (706) 542-8983, nholston@uga.edu

For this film festival in brief, Peabody archivists will assemble a program of roughly two hours duration from a newly announced list of winners that will include examples of TV, radio and internet entertainment, news, documentaries and public service campaigns. Last year’s winners, for instance, included “Portlandia” and “Parks and Recreation,” news coverage of the Japanese tsunami, the website TED.com, and a South African public-service soap opera about the young, the restless and the threat of HIV infection.

The 10 a.m. winners-announcement webcast will be available at www.peabodyawards.com. A complete list of this year’s winners with short descriptions will be posted on the Peabody site after the webcast concludes.

The Peabody Awards, the oldest in broadcasting, are among the selective and coveted prizes in electronic media. The awards recognize excellence and meritorious work by radio and television stations, networks, webcasters, producing organizations and individuals. The 16-member Peabody Board is a distinguished panel of television critics, industry practitioners and experts in culture and the arts. Selection is made by the board following review by special screening committees of UGA faculty, students and staff. For more information regarding the Peabody Awards program, see www.peabodyawards.com.

The Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection is one of the largest broadcasting archives in the country, with over 250,000 titles preserved in film, audio and videotape and other recording formats. The only public archive in Georgia devoted solely to the preservation of audiovisual materials, the Brown Media Archives holds programs dating from the 1920s to the present day. For more information, see http://www.libs.uga.edu/media/index.html  or visit the exhibit space in the Russell Special Collections Building.

The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (March 13, 7:00PM) – A grand slam, it captures a game, a time, a place and an extraordinary life. Greenberg became baseball’s first Jewish star in the 1930s even as anti- Semitism flared at home and raged in Europe. Playing for the Detroit Tigers, he won the American League’s MVP award twice and came within two home runs of tying Babe Ruth’s single-season record in 1938. A 2001 Peabody winner, the film by Aviva Kempner includes rare footage and excerpts from a 1984 interview by Dick Schaap with the original “Hammerin’ Hank” himself.

Peabody Awards
The Peabody Awards, the oldest in broadcasting, are considered among the most prestigious and selective prizes in electronic media. The awards recognize excellence and meritorious work by radio and television stations, networks, webcasters, producing organizations and individuals. The 16-member Peabody Board is a distinguished panel of television critics, industry practitioners and experts in culture and the arts. Selection is made by the Board following review by special screening committees of UGA faculty, students, and staff. For more information regarding the Peabody Awards program, visit www.peabodyawards.com.

The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection is one of the largest broadcasting archives in the country, with over 250,000 titles preserved in film, audio and videotape, and other recording formats. The only public archive in Georgia devoted solely to the preservation of audiovisual materials, the Brown Media Archives holds programs dating from the 1920s to the present day. For more information, see http://www.libs.uga.edu/media/index.html or visit our exhibit space in UGA’s Richard B. Russell Special Collections Library.

Contact: Noel W. Holston, (706) 542-8983, nholston@uga.edu

When It Was a Game (March 6, 7:00PM) – A 1991 Peabody winner from HBO Sports and Black Canyon Productions, it’s a lyrical and loving remembrance of the big leagues in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s assembled largely from footage shot by players as home movies. For anyone who’s nostalgic for the days before multi-millionaire salaries, corporate skyboxes and Astroturf, it’s a must-see.

Peabody Awards
The Peabody Awards, the oldest in broadcasting, are considered among the most prestigious and selective prizes in electronic media. The awards recognize excellence and meritorious work by radio and television stations, networks, webcasters, producing organizations and individuals. The 16-member Peabody Board is a distinguished panel of television critics, industry practitioners and experts in culture and the arts. Selection is made by the Board following review by special screening committees of UGA faculty, students, and staff. For more information regarding the Peabody Awards program, visit www.peabodyawards.com.

The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection is one of the largest broadcasting archives in the country, with over 250,000 titles preserved in film, audio and videotape, and other recording formats. The only public archive in Georgia devoted solely to the preservation of audiovisual materials, the Brown Media Archives holds programs dating from the 1920s to the present day. For more information, see http://www.libs.uga.edu/media/index.html or visit our exhibit space in UGA’s Richard B. Russell Special Collections Library.

Contact: Noel W. Holston, (706) 542-8983, nholston@uga.edu

“When It Was a Game” will be shown on March 6. A 1991 Peabody winner from HBO Sports and Black Canyon Productions, the film is a remembrance of professional baseball in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s assembled largely from footage shot by players as home movies.

“The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg” will be shown March 13. The film looks at baseball’s first Jewish star in the 1930s— a time when anti-Semitism flared in the U.S. and raged in Europe. Playing for the Detroit Tigers, Greenberg won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award twice and came within two home runs of tying Babe Ruth’s single-season record in 1938. A 2001 Peabody winner, the film by Aviva Kempner includes rare footage and excerpts from a 1984 interview by Dick Schaap with the original “Hammerin’ Hank” himself.

“Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream” will be shown March 20. Aaron played 23 seasons with the Milwaukee and Atlanta Braves. Filmmaker Mike Tollin’s 1995 documentary focuses particularly on Aaron’s grace, dignity and focus in the face of hate mail and even death threats as he closed in on Babe Ruth’s all-time career home run record of 714 in 1974.

The films are all part of the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection, one of the largest broadcasting archives in the country, with over 250,000 titles preserved in film, audio and videotape and other recording formats. The only public archive in Georgia devoted solely to the preservation of audiovisual materials, the Brown Media Archives holds programs dating from the 1920s to the present day.

For more information, see http://www.libs.uga.edu/media/index.html or visit the exhibit space in the Russell Special Collections Building.