The E-Learning Program

This project has been created to address the needs of African-American youth and members of the Nassau County community who to desire learn more about African American culture. We have no library in our museum and our educational resources are limited. Visitors’ interest in African American history and culture often goes beyond the subjects of slavery, Dr. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Moment and /or local history. Several times per week, the museum receives calls or visitors with simple questions for which they could not find the answer because they lack capacity to begin a scholarly or focused investigation on subjects related to Americans of African descent. Many people assume that the internet is a easy resource for finding information, but how easy would it be if you had eight names that all meant the same thing, and you only knew three of them? Since there are eight terms used to reference Americans of African descent, and each term or descriptor reveals different information on the Internet and in information systems, a better understanding of term usage is needed. In order to increase end-user precision in information retrieval using these descriptors, the African American Museum has developed a method of grouping these terms that effectively utilizes and specifies the conceptual identity of Americans of African descent relative to content and context in document recognition.

  “Afro-Americans themselves have fought successively for different ways of naming themselves as people: African, colored, Afro-American, Negro, with capital letter, black (with or without capital letter), African-American.  Rather than evidence of Afro-American’s participation in the creation of race, the campaign for each name has been an attempt, particular to the circumstances, to name, define, or create a sense of people-hood, in opposition to the prevailing raced assignment. Each name, once accepted into the general public vocabulary, has simply become a variant word for Afro-Americans race” (Fields 2001).   

 The problems of “naming” and representation identified by Barbara Fields, continue to present serious difficulties because this social phenomenon now manifests itself as an identity crisis in database queries and information retrieval. Most African-American students grades 4^th –12^th are unaware that the above terms (African-American, Afro-American, black, Black, colored, Negro, and slave) are necessary for conducting research about issues relevant to Americans of African descent. The concept of “political correctness” has prevailed in eliminating the use of these terms in ordinary language and asserts a weight or value to individual terms (example, African-American >Negro). As a result, the present generation of young African-Americans, specifically those from working class communities and poor school districts, are very sensitive to term references. This population is less likely to do research in which they will encounter multiple term usage. Term sensitivity may also be the key to understanding why the African-American students grades 4^th –12^th nationally, have scored lower than any other race in the subjects of History and Social Studies for the past two decades. The goal of this program is to desensitize students to term references by introducing them to practical and scholarly application of term usage. The anticipated results are students that understand methods of knowledge organization, literary warrant, information retrieval and how it relates specifically to African-American history and culture in current technology base paradigms.

 Many people are simple unaware of the temporal relationship between terms representing Americans of African descent and information retrieval online or in libraries. The museum currently does not have the computers to allow individual exploration. The inclusion of this information in our research programs through digital technologies is expanding our visitor’s cognitive perception of African-Americans in historical contexts. These programs are reinforced through cross-generational dialogue (programs that include youth, adults and seniors) and curriculum development.