Archives and Special Collections in the University of Mississippi Libraries has a large number of audiovisual (AV) materials documenting Mississippi’s diverse cultural heritage and history. Our audiovisual collections include important recordings of Mississippi’s blues musicians, politicians, visual artists, the Civil Rights Movement, and much more. In 2023 Archives and Special Collections was awarded a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to make this content accessible by digitizing the non-commercial AV formats (16 and 35mm film, Beta tape, U-Matic, VHS, DAT, audiocassette, open-reel audio tape, and more), creating the metadata to make this content discoverable, and creating transcriptions of the content to make the digitized material compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Greg Johnson and Katherine Tutor will give an update on the progress of this grant and show some examples from the first batch of digitized materials that have just been returned.