Amplifying Voices of Dissent With Reveal Digital

For this month’s Collection Blog post, and to continue our ever-growing effort to call attention to works and resources centered around the voices of BIPOC authors, the Collection Development Department is highlighting Reveal Digital.

With collections on topics like student activism, prison newspapers, and alternative press publications, Reveal Digital focuses on giving a platform for the voices of underrepresented communities. The content is compiled and digitized from a variety of libraries, collectors, historical societies, and museums, and is curated into collections addressing particular historical topics or themes related to diversity and protest. Reveal Digital collections are crowdfunded by libraries across the country, including our library. A couple of years ago our Collections Steering Committee contributed to the Documenting White Supremacy and its Opponents in the 1920s collection. All materials are also open access through JSTOR, meaning they are freely available to anyone once they hit their fundraising goal.

All of Reveal Digital’s collections present primary sources that address important social issues interwoven with the voices of those who experienced them first hand. For example, their collection Independent Voices features perspectives of dissident writers in the later half of the 20th-century. With almost 20,000 items of content available, this project contains newspapers, magazines, periodicals, and journals from Native Americans, student radicals, Black Power advocates, LGBT activists, and more. After navigating to the collection’s home page, users can browse materials grouped by smaller categories so readers can select a particular topic that interests them, such as the Latino series with well over a thousand Chicano press newspapers covering key issues such as voter rights and criminal justice.

Some of Reveal Digital’s collections are part of their Diversity and Dissent Fund, a thematic, multi-year fund that supports the ongoing collection and digitization of collections like their American Prison Newspapers, 1800-2020: Voices from the Inside, which our library is contributing to in the coming weeks. Spanning over 200 years, this collection contains over 450 newspapers published within prisons by incarcerated people. Once Reveal Digital’s Diversity and Dissent Fund reaches its target goal, collections like this will be available open access to everyone. But in the meantime, keep checking the DePaul Library News homepage for collections updates on new resources and upcoming access to wonderful collections like American Prison Newspapers from Reveal Digital.