What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called on to solve all our “problems.” The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as “things.” Imagination (image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, any use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image’s use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.

—Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre”, Liberator, July 1965

Dorothy Berry

Niki Kekos
June 3, 2019

Dorothy Berry is the Digital Collections Program Manager at Houghton Library, Harvard University. Before coming to Houghton Library, Berry served as Metadata and Digitization Lead for Umbra Search African American History at University of Minnesota. She has both a Master of the Arts in Ethnomusicology, and a Master of Library Science from Indiana University, where her research focused on building historical ethnography using online databases. Her work has focused on the intersections of information science and African American history, with interests in 19th and early 20th century performances of Blackness in the archives, and in changing descriptive practices to make African American historical materials more authentically accessible.

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Digital Collections Program Manager