About the Index

Unlike related initiatives, this portal is not a database, but an index. Portal to the Black Experience is built entirely using open source libraries/components. The following diagram offers a rudimentary glimpse of its components.

Open Source Library/Component	Version	Description	Role
Solr	4.10.2	Solr (pronounced "solar") is an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling.	For the portal project, all data fields converted from MARC format will be stored in Solr server for search and display.
Angular.js	1.3.4	AngularJS is a structural framework for dynamic web apps. It lets you use HTML as your template language and lets you extend HTML's syntax to express your application's components clearly and succinctly. Angular's data binding and dependency injection eliminate much of the code you would otherwise have to write.	For the portal project, Angular serves as conduit between from end html and Solr server. When user requests the data, Solr returns data in json format. All communication is handled by Angular services controllers.
Html	5	HTML 5 is a revision of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the standard programming language for describing the contents and appearance of Web pages. HTML5 was developed to solve compatibility problems that affect the current standard, HTML4.	Front of the portal is built using html5 which has Angular tags and data fields in it.
Apache HTTP Sever	2.4.7	Apache HTTP is a web server server from the Apache Software Foundation that renders Web pages that include Java Script libraries and code.	Front end source is deployed on Apache Web server.

Data Fields

Portal to the Black Experience is comprised of controlled terms/language, extracted from MARC Name Authority Records (NARs), along with supplementary data placed in local 9XX MARC fields. The following chart provides the fields and subfields that are indexed:

Acronyms:

• ARN = Authority Record Number
• LC = Library of Congress
• MARC = MA chine-ReadableCataloging record
• OCLC = a nonprofit library cooperative
• SNAC = Social Networks and Archival Context
• VIAF = Virtual International Authority File

Data gathering

Eight thousand names were compiled. These names were of well-known persons of sub-Sarahan descent, and to a very limited degree, others who either contributed negatively or positively in a substantive way to the Black experience.

Data has been gathered from two sources: 1) from Black special collections, and 2) from biographical reference works.

Bibliographic data

Three institutions contributed bibliographic data: The Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The District of Columbia Public Library (Black Studies Center).

Biographical reference works

Oxford University Press contributed a list of 8,385 names contained in The Oxford African American Studies Center Online Database, an edited reference work that focuses on the lives and events which have shaped African American and African history and culture. This comprehensive collection of biographies offers content provided from numerous reference works, thus the following biographical references were consulted:

• Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience
• Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass.
• Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
• Black Women in America
• African American National Biography
• Dictionary of African Biography
• Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, 2nd ed. , 2004. Edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
• Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass. Edited by Paul Finkelman
• Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century. Edited by Paul Finkelman
• Black Women in America, Second Edition. 2005. Edited by Darlene Clark Hine
• African American National Biography. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
• Dictionary of African Biography. Edited by Emmanuel Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

When biographical data could not be obtained from the The Oxford African American Studies Center database, Wikipedia was consulted as an alternative resource.

Scope

The biographies span 22 centuries, from the first century BC Roman poet, orator and politician, Gaius Cornelius Gallus, to comedian Christ Rock. One principal aim is to create a list of people that reflects the global dimensions of the African Diaspora. Therefore, the range of people included in Portal to the Black Experience is international in scope, although for historic, cultural reasons, the bulk of people are persons of African descent who lived in North America over the past four centuries.