Well, it's already "Spreadsheet Friday" again... and the last spreadsheet update for Black History Month, but of course I'll be back with more African Diaspora books in March and beyond. There's still lots more to do.
So, here's the latest version of the African Diaspora Folktale Spreadsheet, and I crossed a nice milestone this week: over 3000 stories (3032 to be exact) from 46 different books and articles.
Meanwhile, the big African Folktale Spreadsheet is available also (I ended up with over 10,000 individual stories there), and my long-term goal is to be able to share some good resources here for people who want to research the African origins of the Diaspora stories.
For more information about the spreadsheet project, you can browse previous posts, and what I wanted to end with today is a great piece from the San Francisco Chronicle about Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive. If you haven't followed the news about the mega-publishers who are suing Internet Archive in order to put an end to Controlled Digital Lending, you can learn more about that here: Inside a former S.F. church, a battle for the future of knowledge.
If the publishers get their way, all the digital books I've been writing about at this blog will be destroyed... the only resources that will remain are the public domain resources from 1926 and earlier, trapping us in the racist and colonial context of those publications. We desperately need a library like the Internet Archive so that we can have access to the traditional stories of African and African American storytellers: right now, these books are available to anyone, just a click away, thanks to the Internet Archive's Controlled Digital Lending project. If you want to find out more, visit Library Futures; there's lots more you can learn there too!
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