In the fall of 2019, the Brandeis National Committee announced their new campaign, entitled Honoring Our History. In conjunction with President Ron Liebowitz’s Framework for Our Future, the Honoring our History campaign will strive to fulfill the university’s founding principles of access, inclusivity and tolerance by supporting digitization of the Brandeis Library’s unique collections highlighting social justice.
These special collections, including the Leo Frank Trial Collection, the Helmut Hirsch Collection, the Jewish Resistance Collection, the Jewish Feminism Collection, the Spitzer Family Papers, and the University Photography Collection, provide insight into the narratives of 20th century men and women living in a time of overt antisemitism, racism, and institutionalized sexism. These issues are problems that we still struggle to address today. The importance of providing global access to these narratives that highlight the fight for inclusivity and tolerance cannot be understated.
The digitization of the Brandeis Library’s unique collections is not as simple as making them available online. This campaign will support the entire process of digitization, which includes ensuring the discoverability of these narratives outside of the Brandeis community and enabling forms of digital scholarship that can be used in schools and in research internationally. These unique collections, much like the narratives found within them, deserve to not only exist, but to be remembered, shared, and appreciated.
