Research & Instruction Librarian University of Mississippi Libraries
At the Extraordinary Session of the Mississippi Legislature of 1953, legislation was passed to abolish all public school districts in the state. The caveat, all districts would continue to operate as normal until they developed a plan to reconstitute the existing district or incorporate all of the area within a county into a district. Before developing a plan, each county school board was required to conduct a survey of their facilities, etc. These surveys have provided researchers with a wealth of information and understanding regarding Mississippi’s segregated schools of the 1950’s. Due to the amount of researcher requests in this area, UM Libraries made digitization of these materials a priority. The surveys were digitized and added to eGrove, the University’s digital repository. A story map of the surveys was also created to allow those unfamiliar with Mississippi the ability to explore the surveys in an interactive and informative way. While most of the collection consists of school surveys from the 1950’s, the entire digitized collection contains over 140 Mississippi school survey’s spanning from 1916 to 1972.