The Southern Media Archive has long been a vital part of the Center’s work, and we are particularly proud of recent developments. In August, Center faculty and staff went to Vicksburg for the premiere showing at the Southern Cultural Heritage Foundation of an important Archive project, A Mississippi Portrait: Farm Security Administration Photographs, 1935-1940. This CD-Rom contains over 1,230 photograph from the Library of Congress, designed as a tool for teaching and research.

   The CD-Rom is not just a collection of photographs but an educational tool. The photographs can be searched by photographer, county, subject, and negative number. Supporting curriculum materials assist teachers in adapting it to the classroom. Karen Glynn, visual resources curator of the Archive, and her assistants did much research, as well, to verify information in captions and to clarify unresolved issues.

   The Archive has also launched a new Web site, A Hundred Years at Perthshire, which enables visitors to the site to view photographs, read correspondence, listen to interviews, and watch clips of home movies. It is a striking documentary work. The plan is to include many modules dealing with different aspects of life at Perthshire, a Mississippi Delta plantation that has been well documented for a century and provides rich material for glimpses of both white and black society.

   These projects are two dramatic examples of the work of the Southern Media Archive. It collects photographs, film footage, and audio recordings of Southerners from all walks of life and uses them as the basis for creative documentary projects. The Archive contains, among other material, studio photography such as the 12,000 images in the Cofield Collection from Oxford, Mississippi, and the more than 100,000 Gladin Collection photographs from Helena, Arkansas.  The Howard Collection has approximately 160,000 negatives from Vic Howard, who documented everyday life in Harlan County, Kentucky, from the 1940s through the early 1970s. The Home Movie Collection has about 60 sets of film footage from the ongoing project “Picturing Home: Family Movies as Local History.”

   Karen Glynn came to the Center as a Southern Studies graduate student and wrote one of my favorite theses--on mule racing in the Mississippi Delta. Having discovered home movies of mule racing, she used those, plus interviews, photographs, and other sources to analyze the society of the Delta. Her interest in home movies has helped make them a primary resource of the Archive, and she recently received a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve one of the most significant home movie collections in the state, that of Emma Knowlton Lytle.

   The Archive’s projects are an important facet of Center work. One of the Center’s strengths has always been in documentary studies, and the Archive draws from faculty such as David Wharton, director of documentary projects at the Center; staff such as Daniel Sherman, imaging technologies coordinator; and graduate students who work with Karen. Students in Southern Studies, art, history, anthropology, sociology, and journalism also make use of Archive material in research and teaching. The Archive provides as well a connection to the broader communities the Center serves. The premiere of A Mississippi Portrait, for example, took place at the Southern Cultural Heritage Foundation in Vicksburg, which has often worked with the Center on public programs.