Online King Records Access (OKRA) Launched

The King Research and Education Institute will launch an online database  making details and descriptions of over four thousand documents on or about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. publicly available. The King Institute will launch the new resource on Monday, May 18, 2009. An additional four thousand document records will be available by year’s end.

The Online King Records Access database (OKRA) is a collective effort of three prestigious institutions associated with King research: the King Institute, the Morehouse College King Papers at the Special Collections Library of the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Atlanta University Center, and the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation generously funded this project.

Clayborne Carson, Stanford historian and Institute director, remarked on the online project, “The OKRA database represents decades of accumulated knowledge about the major repositories for King materials in the United States. Researchers will be able to find the location of thousands of Dr. King’s speeches, sermons, personal and organizational letters, and photos. This is the only public database on King archives that provides scholarly details and description on each individual item. It will prove to be of immense value to King researchers and individuals interested in the life and work of Dr. King and the civil rights movement.”

The new online database was created by utilizing copies of documents acquired by the Institute in the process of publishing its ground-breaking comprehensive, fourteen-volume work, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. The Institute has completed work on six volumes of The Papers; volumes VII and VIII are in progress. Document records will contain information on document types, names, organizations and other references, archival locations, and topics for documents used in the publication of The Papers. The Gotlieb Center and Woodruff Library are currently processing their own King collections and updating the online database with this new information.

For details and updates on the OKRA database, please visit http://www.kingpapers.org.