18 digital archival efforts to learn about Baltimore and its people

Baltimore boasts a diverse array of archives, databases and comparable resources that offer newcomers and long-term residents alike a pathway to understanding its past and current reality.

Those interested can start their journeys through the following initiatives and efforts, which cross industries and interests.

Baltimore’s businesses

Baltimore BASE Network

The Small Business Ecosystem shorts offer a playlist of short video stories that explore the city’s small businesses. The series is produced by the Baltimore BASE Network, an equity-minded coalition of businesses and supporting resources from the Baltimore Development Corporation and the Mayor’s Office of Minority and Women-Owned Business Advocacy and Development.

Baltimore Museum of Industry

A virtual tour of the Key Highway museum might inspire you to explore its online collections database, which, since 2006, includes digital reproductions ranging from the Read Drug Store counter to the lunchroom at BGE in the 1960s.

Broader Baltimore history and culture

University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)

If you want to delve deeper into Baltimore poet Edgar Allan Poe or the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, you may find the photographs in the UMBC Digital Collections’ “Baltimore Collection” a valuable resource. Comprising 96 images, this database provides glimpses into everyday life and events in Charm City during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Enoch Pratt Free Library

Hosted by Michigan-based ProQuest, one of the Pratt Library’s “sexy” databases holds archives from some of Baltimore’s notable newspapers that go back as far as 1837. If you have a library card, you can access these collections, and even current news outlets like The Baltimore Banner, free for 30 days.

Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive (MARMIA)

MARMIA, a nonprofit with offices in Impact Hub Baltimore, provides archiving services throughout the Delaware, DC and Maryland areas. MARMIA’s collection includes home movies and even mixtapes, but its most extensive assembly, spanning thousands of hours, is the WJZ-TV Collection, which features moments like Oprah Winfrey’s tenure as a co-anchor for the local television station.

Mount Vernon Place Conservancy (MVPC)

Even if you reside just a stone’s throw away from the Washington Monument in Baltimore’s Mt. Vernon neighborhood, you can learn something by exploring an online virtual tour that MVPC crafted in collaboration with partners like the Owings Mills-based scanning technology company Direct Dimensions. Produced by the Virginian company Cortina Productions, this 3-D digital exhibition is also accessible via touch tables at the monument’s base.

Baltimore’s environment

Living Classrooms Foundation

A push for a swimmable Baltimore Harbor didn’t start with the recent announcement of “Harbor Splash,” which is what it sounds like: a public swim in the harbor. 11 years ago, students working with the Living Classrooms Foundation created a documentary to express their shared vision of a healthy harbor.

Baltimore Tree Trust

This 2023 Technical.ly Awards nominee created a digital story map for Patterson Park that showcases topographical points, a brief history of the park, details on tree species in the park, park structures and historical insights about regional wars.

Civic and social justice in Charm City

The Baltimore Uprising Archive Project

This collaborative archive aims to preserve the perspectives and experiences in Baltimore related to the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death. This initiative encourages contributions related to events spanning from protests to cleanups.

“Hiding in the Walls”

Angel King Wilson’s roughly hour-long documentary uncovers the long-standing issue of lead poisoning in America, focusing on the disproportionate impact on Black communities in cities like Baltimore.

“Not About a Riot”

This award-winning, first-person video documentary by local filmmaker Malaika Aminata Clements captures the period in Baltimore immediately following the death of Freddie Gray.

Black Baltimore

Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture

Situated in Downtown Baltimore, the Lewis Museum has an online database of its physical collection featuring highlights and works from locals such as Junetta Jones, the first Black woman from Baltimore to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and photographer Robert Houston.

Maryland Institute Black Archives (MIBA)

MIBA founder Deyane Moses aims to uncover Black history at the Baltimore-based Maryland Institute College of Art, a prestigious art college. MIBA’s collections include newspaper clippings, photos, and submissions from Black-identifying alumni, faculty and staff. Those interested are encouraged to participate by submitting their contributions through the archives’ site or by emailing info.mibaonline@gmail.com.

Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center

As the public-facing entity of Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries special collections, the Tabb Center provides access to its collection through its public humanities fellowships program. Among its digital stacks are photographs and archival materials linked to Ethel Ennis and Billie Holiday. In 2023, center fellow Nicoletta Daríta de la Brown used these resources for her installation, “Be(longing): Unveiling the Imprint of Black Women Hidden in Plain Sight.”

Baltimore’s Asian culture

Greater Baltimore Asian community history

Towson University, along with its Asian Arts & Culture Center (AA&CC), initiated the documentation of APIMEDA (Asian Pacific Islander Middle Eastern Desi American) narratives within the Baltimore region in 2015. This collaborative archival effort involves contributions from staff, students, interns, community researchers and artists. The collection encompasses a variety of mediums exploring themes related to the APIMEDA experience in Baltimore, including the city’s former Chinatown.

Indigenous peoples in Baltimore

Baltimore Reservation Project

Ashley Minner Jones, a community artist, folklorist and enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, pursued a community-focused archival project at UMBC after experiencing being misidentified and the psychological impact of not seeing her peoples’ stories reflected in popular narratives of Baltimore. She aims to reclaim and preserve the history of the inter-tribal American Indian community in Baltimore, which grew amid a surge in factory jobs around World War II. Soon the project will include a digital version of the archive made accessible through the Baltimore American Indian Center and UMBC. The archive will feature, among other offerings, a 1969 federally commissioned map of the Lumbee community during its peak.

LGBTQ Baltimore

University of Baltimore (UB)

UB previously acquired Pride Festival planning records, ephemera and artifacts from a former LGBTQ community center now known as the Pride Center of Maryland (formerly GLCCB). The digital archive encompasses the center’s history on Chase Street and the days of The Hippo nightclub. It also includes memorabilia and recorded oral histories from the LGBTQ community — all housed in UB’s digital repository.

 “Glory Days”

Baltimore-based photojournalist, artist and archivist SHAN Wallace has been offering glimpses of an upcoming project, “Glory Days,” through its crowdfunding campaign. According to the project’s Instagram page, this endeavor will involve a feature film that chronicles the history of Baltimore’s LGBTQ nightlife, as Wallace experienced it in the role of a “partygoer.”