Black Archives of Mid-America Website Review

The Black Archives of Mid-America (BAMA) serves as a repository for documents concerning the history of African Americans in the middle states. Archivists of BAMA erected a website that contains a lot of digitized archives and ways to navigate their collections online. Overall, however, the BAMA website viewed on March 6, 2007 suffers from the mistakes made by many academics and scholars.

BAMA, a nonprofit organization founded in 1974, has a mission to conserve and collect information about the history of African Americans in the Midwest. Archivists also claim a responsibility to make their collections available to the community. They represent this mission by offering a variety of sources, or descriptions of sources, online. The website, therefore, contains documentation ranging in categories from the arts, medicine and education. BAMA simply organizes an archive and the archivists do not offer any arguments about the materials they house. They do, however, sufficiently express their mission and support their purpose with the contents of their website.

The BAMA website brings scholars and African American history enthusiasts far away from a time when they had to pick documents out of dusty draws or search for sources using card catalogues. The website makes available a simple and advanced search engine. Researches can utilize categories such as Alvin Ailey, religion, military, and slavery for online searches. The advanced search option allows users to indicate preferences for types of sources, dates and subject areas, for example. Document types range from pictures, letters and correspondence. Search results list each kind of document type. Additionally, the BAMA website includes digitized sources. One might find an actual copy of correspondence from Marcus Garvey of the Universal Negro Improvement Association within the BAMA digitized archives. Like the digitized archives, the online gallery is one of the most exciting aspects of the BAMA website. Researches can uses headings like baseball and portraits to guide them through numerous photograph copies that they can enlarge for closer inspection.

Despite the many advantages to the BAMA online resources archivists overlooked some very important issues with their website. On initial inspection the first issue with the site is the color scheme. The majority of the website is a light brown while the links are tan. This oversight prevents users from effortlessly distinguishing links. After users click on links they can not easily tell what section of the website they have located. Archivists should invest in updating their website so that a visual tab system locates users in relation to other areas of the site. Unfortunately, lack of homepage links on every page of the site further complicates the user’s experience. The logo representing BAMA could also stand some revision. A silhouette of a man’s facial profile with a brain lodged in the middle somehow does not seem related to BAMA’s overall mission or purpose. Perhaps the logo relates better on paper and needs to be properly converted to have the same impact online.

The photo gallery, one of the best features of the site, is also hard to navigate. After users click to enlarge photos they have to press the back button on their browser in order to return back to the gallery. This part of the site could use links that allows researchers to easily browse from image to image like they would in a gallery, or at least a link that connects them back to the main gallery. In addition, the images need to be properly and consistently labeled. One might click to enlarge an image and find no attempt to label the subjects or source of the image. Researchers could benefit from definitively knowing that archivists do not include any said image in a particular collection or could not identify subject(s).

Many scholars still believe that any website with too many flying graphics and complicated digital tricks may be unreliable. After all, credible academics specialize in analyzing information, not using space aged technology to present findings. For this reason, many researchers may appreciate the efforts by BAMA archivists to simplify their efforts making BAMA resources available online. Many scholars believe that some accessibility online beats traveling to the Midwest and sitting alone in some vault-like archive. Regardless, the BAMA website could use some adjustments. These efforts would contribute a minor part to making the researching process and exchange of analyses faster than scholars of centuries past could ever imagine.