Goshen College Professor launches heritage library
Dec. 27—GOSHEN — Jan Bender Shetler, director of global engagement and professor of history at Goshen College, has spent the past 40 years of her life conducting and analyzing oral history research on cultural memory in Tanzania.
This summer, her research entered a new phase with the official public launch of the Mara Cultural Heritage Digital Library (MCHDL).
In 2020, Shetler received a three-year National Endowment for the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Implementation Grant, Goshen College reported. The grant made it possible for Shetler and her team to partner with the Matrix Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Michigan State University to create the site's platform. The MCHDL will also be housed in Matrix's Africa Online Digital Library.
The MCDHL represents the culmination of two decades of work digitizing and transcribing Shetler's research. The database collects Shetler's more than 300 interviews into one easily accessible location, including video, audio, transcripts, fieldnotes and photographs.
The Mara Cultural Heritage Digital Library team will continue to add content to the website. Student assistants are now in the process of uploading Shetler's 2010 interviews covering women's histories as well as working on the Zedekia Oloo Siso Collection, a popular historian in the Mara Region.
The MCHDL's new site has been described by Albertus K. Onyiego, a history professor at the University of Dar es Salaam, as "one of the most useful research repositories for [the] Mara Region" of Tanzania.
