The Black Washtenaw County Team (BWC) launched their website, the Black Washtenaw County Collaboratory, in early December, marking a major achievement for the group in making their project accessible to the general public.
Meghana Tummala, a Wallenberg Fellow and recent Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning graduate, joined the team over a year ago. She was initially hired to assist the Visual Identity and Design working group with the website design/development alongside Mia Glionna, who recently graduated with her Masters of Science in Information. Meghana was tasked with creating an internal website to aid in tracking team members’ work and making a space where all of their collective documents would be accessible to the team members. This turned into creating an external website for the team, to include general information about the projects, archival materials, and a blog to follow the team’s progress.
“A website,” as opposed to other modes of information communication, “made the most sense for our team since a lot of the material has already been digitized and we just needed to figure out a visually pleasing and accessible way to deliver the information to the public,” says Meghana. She shared that the team put a lot of thought into the design of the website to accurately represent the work of BWC, “[I]t was especially rewarding to see all the different projects and elements across the different working groups come together in one place.”
There was also some difficulty in configuring the website so that the archival materials would retain professional quality but not take up all of the storage space on the website. She credits Joe Bauer, Digital Scholarship Research Consultant, with helping her better understand the website builder’s, Omeka-S, tools to solve this problem.
The website isn’t the only place where the BWC’s work is displayed. Their exhibit is currently open at the African American Cultural and Historical Museum, displaying origin stories of four historic families in Washtenaw County. The exhibit’s materials are available on the website for those who don’t have the chance to see them in person.
You can find the website here.