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This paper was originally presented on the panel "The past is present: African primary sources and cultural materials in the digital age" at ECAS conference, Edinburgh, June 2019.
Introduction
Primary sources are evidence created at the time of an event or after by participants or observers. Examples may include text - memoirs, letters, manuscripts, diaries, newspapers; images - photographs and posters; audio or video recordings - oral histories and speeches; artifacts - furniture, pottery, and cultural objects. These are the raw materials historians use to meaningfully reconstruct the past. These along with previous interpretations by other historians or secondary sources are the tools needed to perform historical research. This paper examines the intersection of African primary sources, new digital technologies and new active learning teaching methods within the teaching of African history. It discusses new approaches to teaching and learning history in undergraduate programs in the United States using both tangible and digital primary sources. It examines the potential impact of digital primary sources on the teaching and learning of African history and how it could effectively be used to contextualize and connect students to Africa's past. Selected examples of freely accessible online collections of primary sources are examined as well as their discovery and access. Also examined is the potential role of faculty, librarians and archivists in the discovery, access and adoption of digital primary sources in an African history classroom.
Traditionally most primary sources are found in museums, archives, libraries, private collections or reproduced in print or microform. Some collections are found in endangered conditions, without care in obscure locations or exposed to poor environmental conditions. Materials were typically locked in drawers and boxes, scholars, researchers and graduate students used to be the sole consumers of these materials often with some restrictions and at great costs to their budgets. In the mid-1990s libraries, archives, museums and other cultural institutions began projects to digitize and preserve historically valuable collections, opening local collections to wider audiences. Millions of primary source materials are now accessible online, drastically changing the way historians search, access, and utilize such materials in teaching, learning and research. The majority of these collections are freely accessible online and often show up in Google or other search engine searches. Dooley and Luce (2010)...
