The Flowerings Project: A Library in Transformation

This final report from the JMU Libraries and Furious Flower Poetry Center to the Mellon Foundation describes in detail the activities undertaken as part of a 2020-2021 planning grant, “Furious Flowerings: Developing a Partnership Model for Digital Library Support of a Living Center for Black Poetry,” funded by the Mellon Foundation. The grant explored and developed a partnership model for integrated library support of a living, academic center for the arts with archival, scholarly, digital, educational, and performance components. Nine key areas were addressed, including three overarching areas: development of cultural competencies, exploring how an exemplar project can be used to manage organizational and cultural change, and fostering partners\u27 understanding of library processes, systems, expertise, and goals, as well as six domain and application areas: inclusive archival workflows, frameworks for multimedia preservation and performance capture, teaching-and-learning collaborations, and policies and platforms for sustainable digital publications. The report describes model development, activities, findings, recommendations, challenges, lessons learned, future goals, evaluations, publications, and the grant timeline and logistics