The Mayor Ivan Allen Digital Archive is a digital humanities project that collects the digitized mayoral records of Ivan Allen Jr., the fifty-second mayor of Atlanta, from 1962 to 1970. The archive showcases material from one of the most historic decades in Atlanta’s history. It functions as the primary digital repository documenting Mayor Allen’s role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the history of race relations in 1960s Atlanta, construction of the Atlanta Stadium, massive changes in desegregation, infrastructure, housing, and transportation overseen by Allen’s administration, and much more. This selection of approximately 10,000 documents (over 30,000 pages) is representative of Allen's mayoral papers, of which the originals are the property of the City of Atlanta and reside at the Atlanta History Center. A finding aid for the originals can be viewed here.
Originally digitized in 2016 by a team of researchers and students with the support of the Digital Integrated Liberal Arts Center (DILAC) and funded by the Mellon Foundation, this Omeka-based project continues to be developed with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities' Office of Digital Humanities, for use as a pedagogical resource in the Writing and Communication Program, School of History and Sociology, and other units at Georgia Tech. In 2019, the Archive won an award for Excellence in the Educational Use of Historical Records from the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council.
There are two ways of browsing the Mayoral Records Archive: