Preserves Online: Make Preserves

Wednesday 18 July 2012

Make Preserves

Howard Dodson, Jr., has committed his professional life to the retrieval, preservation, interpretation, and dissemination of the history and culture of African and African American peoples. Since 1984, he has served as chief of the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the world's leading and most prestigious repository for materials and artifacts on black cultural life.
A scholar, consultant, lecturer, and educator, Dodson has guided the Schomburg Center through major fund-raising and expansion projects, including successful capital campaigns and multi-million-dollar construction and renovation projects. In the spring of 1991, the Center celebrated its 65th anniversary with the opening of the newly expanded complex, which included an auditorium, an exhibition hall, the Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division, and much-needed additional space for acquisitions. By 2005 the Center had well-established educational and cultural programs, including seminars, exhibitions, forums, film screenings, performing arts programs, readings, and special events, to complement and interpret its collections. The programming was carefully developed to highlight the resources of the library as a research center, however. Dodson told American Visions that "There has been the recurring question of the role educational and cultural programs and exhibits play in the life of an institution like this. We see our interpretive programming as a means of focusing attention on the collection and on the issues and themes in the African and African-American diasporan experience."