This summer, Berry proposed a project to make those lesser-known voices a little easier to hear. Amid the pandemic, Houghton’s regular digitization projects have been put mostly on hold, and when protests arose after George Floyd’s killing, it sparked a nationwide hunger to understand black history and experiences. Libraries and institutions seemed suddenly keen to support African-American communities. “It felt like a great opportunity to increase black representation in our digital collections,” says Berry, whose professional background is in African-American-focused archival work. She put together project titled, “Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom: Primary Sources from Houghton Library.” Leading a team of colleagues, she will spend the 2020-21 academic year building out the library’s digital collection of records related to African-American history: thousands of items from the late eighteenth century through the early twentieth.