What is “Black” about Black Bibliography?

TY - JOUR

T1 - What is “Black” about Black Bibliography?

AU - Goldsby, Jacqueline

AU - McGill, Meredith L.

N1 - Funding Information: were mailed to subscribers.12 Work’s masterpiece, A Bibliography of the Negro in Africa and America, was the culmination of twenty-five years of research. Financed by major grants from the Carnegie Corporation and the Phelps Stokes Fund, Work’s Bibliography compiled over 17,000 entries organized in seventy-four carefully classified chapters covering a staggering range of topics. Work traveled the US and Europe to document multilingual sources that spanned the globe. The standard-setting innovator in Black librarianship, Dorothy Porter, paid homage to this bibliographic forebear, noting that “Monroe Work’s contribution, as a bibliographer, to the study of American Negro and the African cannot be measured. It supplied a great basic need for Negro scholarship. It was ‘a monument of which any man [of] any race may well be proud.’”13 Richard Newman’s landmark Black Access: A Bibliography of Afro-American Bibliographies was published in 1984, nearly a half century after Du Bois’s and Work’s efforts. In her introduction to that formidable volume—encompassing 3,000 bibliographies of Black writing—Dorothy Porter endorsed Newman’s work as “the standard for a good many years to come.”14 Newman, in turn, credited Betty Gubert’s 1982 Early Black Bibliographies for reprinting the key catalogs and checklists compiled by the great nineteenth-and early twentieth-century bibliophiles of Black print culture: Robert Adger, William C. Bolivar, Daniel A. P. Murray, and Arturo Schomburg, among others.15Prior to these compilations, the 1930s and 1940s gave rise to a quiet boom in Black bibliographic writing; the post-Harlem Renaissance and World War II era coincided with the growth of Funding Information: 51. Our work designing and testing the data model was funded through an Officer’s Grant generously awarded from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2018.

PY - 2022/6

Y1 - 2022/6

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85131401868&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85131401868&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1086/719985

DO - 10.1086/719985

M3 - Comment/debate

AN - SCOPUS:85131401868

SN - 0006-128X

VL - 116

SP - 161

EP - 189

JO - Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America

JF - Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America

IS - 2

ER -