ANN ARBOR, Mich., March 18, 2008 - ProQuest will be adding a collection of one hundred oral history videos from The HistoryMakers, the nation's largest African American video oral history archive to its Black Studies Center. Each video is two to three hours in length and accompanied by complete, searchable transcripts. Black Studies Center, the first resource of its kind for the academic community, creates a framework for undergraduate and graduate level Black Studies courses and provides information that cannot be found elsewhere.

"Black Studies Center offers outstanding breadth of coverage on current and historical aspects of Black Studies,  and it provides a central point of access for the most sought-after information to chronicle and analyze the Black experience," said Mary Sauer-Games, vice president of publishing for ProQuest.  "The addition of video interviews will not only give researchers powerful stories from notable African Americans, but will also offer unique insight about the events that have impacted the lives of remarkable African Americans and encouraged them to make a difference in the world around them." 

The interviews present full accounts of the person's early life, family history, education, and professional work.  The interviews are of contemporary African Americans, many of whom were the first to break various barriers in business, science, medicine, education, and government. Black Studies Center's The HistoryMakers collection includes interviews of Barack Obama, Reverend Al Sharpton, Gordon Parks, John Lewis, John H. Johnson, Julian Bond, Nikki Giovanni, John Hope Franklin, Terry MacMillian,, Isaac Hayes, Alvin Poussaint, and many more.   Each oral history video will include a transcript that is subject-indexed.   Videos will also be browseable by name of interviewee, occupation, subject, and theme. 

The HistoryMakers video oral histories will add an exciting new dimension to the Black Studies Center, from ProQuest's Chadwyck-Healey brand, allowing cross-searching with other unique content sets focused on the African American experience.  Founder and Executive Director of the The HistoryMakers Julieanna Richardson says, "We are so pleased to have this collaboration with ProQuest and look forward to this material finding use in libraries and universities around the globe." 

Black Studies Center is organized around Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, a core collection of studies from the foremost academic experts, summarizing the current state of research and scholarship on important themes such as African-American religion, the slave trade and slavery; performing arts and popular culture, and the African-American family.  Extensive bibliographies, multimedia, and selected full-text, primary research materials are also included.  To further enrich the resource,  Black Studies Center also offers the entire Chicago Defender newspaper from 1910 to 1975 and full-text, academic journals from the International Index to  Black Periodicals, with a journal index back to 1902 . Users may easily explore relationships between themes, people, and events, through scanning rich and diverse content that supports a vast array of disciplines.

About ProQuest
ProQuest provides seamless access to and navigation of more than 125 billion digital pages of the world's scholarship, delivering it to the desktop and into the workflow of serious researchers in multiple fields, from arts, literature, and social science to science, technology, and medicine.  ProQuest is part of Cambridge Information Group (www.cambridgeinformationgroup.com).

ProQuest's vast content pools are available to researchers through libraries of all types and include the world's largest digital newspaper archive, periodical databases comprising the output of more than 9,000 titles and spanning more than 500 years, the pre-eminent dissertation collection, and various other scholarly collections. Users access the information through the ProQuest®  and CSA Illumina™ online information systems, Chadwyck-Healey™ electronic and microform resources, UMI® microform and print reference products, eLibrary® and SIRS® educational resources, Ulrich's® Serials Analysis System, COS Scholar Universe, and Serials Solutions® resource management tools. Through the expertise of business units Serials Solutions and COS, ProQuest provides technological tools that allow researchers and libraries to better manage and use their information resources.   For more information, visit www.proquest.com, www.proquest.co.uk, and www.csa.com

About The  HistoryMakers
Founded in July 1999 as a national 501 (c ) (3) not for profit organization, The HistoryMakers represents the single largest African American archival collection in the world. The purpose of this collection is to educate and show the breadth and depth of the African American experience through first person narratives of both well-known and unsung African Americans. In doing so, The HistoryMakers is capturing American history one person at a time, giving those involved their special place in history to educate the world about African American determination and achievement as well as about the importance of African American-led institutions, movements and  organizations. The HistoryMakers is focused on the contributions of African Americans to history, education, music, law, the arts, science, technology, media, medicine, entertainment, business, the military, politics and sports.  The goal is to preserve this material for years and generations to come, creating an unprecedented digital collection that will be accessible to museums, libraries and schools  as well as in the media using print, radio, television, cable television and the Internet.