The UALR Center for Arkansas History and Culture (CAHC) is pleased to welcome Danielle Butler as the project archivist for “The Road from Hell is Paved with Little Rocks: Digitizing the History of Segregation and Integration of Arkansas’s Educational System,” made possible by a grant from the Digitizing Hidden Collections Initiative sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Danielle Butler
Butler began her journey at CAHC in the Fall of 2014 as a graduate assistant and graduated in May 2016 with a master’s degree in Public History with an archival specialization.
Before enrolling in the Public History master’s program at UALR, Butler completed her undergraduate degree in history at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia (Clark County), Arkansas.
“Throughout the course of the Public History program I became interested in digital humanities and digitization,” stated Butler. “I am excited to be apart of this project because of its focus on providing digital access to collections. The collection material also largely addresses minority groups in Arkansas, and I look forward to helping make their story part of the larger historical narrative.”
As project archivist, Butler’s tasks will range from preparing collection material to be digitized, quality checking and renaming items when they are returned, generating metadata, and uploading digital surrogates into the appropriate institutional catalogs. Three institutions are participating in this project: the UALR Center for Arkansas History and Culture, the Central Arkansas Library System Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, and the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site.
The project is estimated to take 18 months to complete. During this time patrons can follow Butler, along with guest contributors, on the project blog.
