Public invited to 'City of Dreams' unveiling Oct. 17 at Stockton A.C. campus

The Atlantic City Free Public Library will unveil its new digital repository — highlighting African-American history in the city — Monday, Oct. 17, from 1-3 p.m. at the Stockton University Atlantic City campus in the Fannie Lou Hamer Event Room. Parking will be available in the surface lot located directly behind Stockton’s John F. Scarpa Academic Center.

Those who can't make it in person can watch the event virtually.

The Atlantic City Heritage Collections staff digitized 25 collections as part of the “The City of Dreams: The Atlantic City Experience” project. The library received a grant of $122,957 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to implement the project and create the digital repository.

As part of City of Dreams, the library’s Heritage Collections staff added approximately 12,000 items — including 7,000 documents and 4,800 photographs — to the digital repository. The digital repository also includes collections of videos, audio, scrapbooks and artifacts on an internet platform for unlimited access. It will be available to the public beginning Oct. 17 at the library website and The Atlantic City Experience website.

City of Dreams is the first stage in creating “The Atlantic City Heritage Collections Digital Repository,” providing a new level of online access to the library’s extensive archival collections. This will greatly improve research services for residents, students, teachers, authors, archivists and researchers throughout the world.

Call archivist Jacqueline Silver-Morillo at (609) 345-2269, ext. 3063, or email jmorillo(at)acfpl.org, for more information about this project.

The City of Dreams: the Atlantic City Experience project has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.

(Pictured are the Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City, a Negro league baseball team)