About MBDA
Update February 21, 2023: This project is no longer active. You can still search the uploaded documents. However, crowdsourced editing and editor accounts are no longer supported. There are plans for migrating the information to a new platform in the future.
The Martha Berry Digital Archive (MBDA) Project initiated in fall 2010 with the aim of digitizing and exposing for public and scholarly use the complete set of documents housed within the Martha Berry Collection at the Berry College Archives. Because documents had been preserved exclusively in their original physical (i.e. print) format, scholars, students, historians, and community members interested in studying the rich history and cultural heritage preserved within the collection had not been able to explore it fully.
Through the MBDA Project, the Martha Berry Collection is being disseminated as a freely available, interactive, searchable, and extensible, educational resource which is designed to enable teachers, researchers, students, and members of the larger community to study and learn from it. One of the most exciting aspects of the project is discovering documents which reveal new insights about Martha Berry, the Berry Schools, and other facets of early twentieth-century culture and history.
A partnership between Bloomsburg University (where project director and Berry alumna Stephanie Schlitz is a faculty member) and Berry College, and between library, museum, English, history, education, information technology, math, and linguistics faculty, staff, and students, the MBDA project is defined by its collaborative and interdisciplinary focus. We encourage prospective collaborators interested in helping us develop MBDA's teaching, research and cultural heritage potential to contact us about getting involved.