The Neighborhoods Project was created as part of the Community Programs department within Duke's Center for Documentary Studies. According to the CDS website, it offered North Carolina elementary school teachers an innovative and effective way to meet social studies goals outlined in the state's standard course of study. The project provided a way to engage students in their own communities, focusing on their individual lives and stories through photographs, narrative writing, and storytelling. It provided a series of experiential learning activities that encouraged the use of photography, oral history, and narrative writing in an exploration of community and citizenship. Collection includes black-and-white photographs, negatives, and slides from projects created by students at Durham's E.K. Powe and W.G. Pearson elementary schools between 1997 and 2004. The images document the social life and the built environment in Durham, N.C., in city neighborhoods where the students live; they feature children, pets, houses and places of business, groups of adults, and other neighborhood scenes where whites, African Americans, and Spanish-seeking citizens live. Some materials are in Spanish. Also includes some student booklets and publications highlighting their projects as part of the program. Acquired as part of the Archive for Documentary Arts.

Collection includes black-and-white photographs (a few are hand-colored), negatives, and slides from projects created by students at Durham's E.K. Powe and W.G. Pearson elementary schools between 1997 and 2004. The images document the social life and the built environment in Durham, N.C., in city neighborhoods where the students live; they feature children, pets, houses and places of business, groups of adults, and other neighborhood scenes. Also includes some student booklets and publications highlighting their projects as part of the program. Materials are sorted by school, with miscellaneous or unidentified materials in the last series. Also contains electronic and audiovisual recordings that require reformatting before use.

Acquired by the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University.

The Durham Traditional Arts Survey was conducted in the early 2000s as part of the Document Durham project within the Community Programs department at the Center for Documentary Studies. Participants consisted of folklorists and photographers who traveled through Durham County, attempting to document the diversity of various communities by focusing on traditional artists within those communities. One outcome of the DTAS was the Home Made Visible: Durham 2002 exhibition, which highlighted Durham traditional arts and crafts. Includes fieldwork reports, interview tapes, slides, photographs, and other documentary material from the research and observations conducted by participants in the Durham Traditional Arts Survey Project. Durham communities and artists represented in the project include African American, African immigrants, Latino, Middle Eastern, Jewish, South Indian, and Asian, as well as occupational traditions and rural community traditions. Acquired as part of the Archive of Documentary Arts.

Includes fieldwork reports, interview tapes, slides, photographs, and other documentary material from the research and observations conducted by participants in the Durham Traditional Arts Survey Project. Durham communities and artists represented in the project include African American, African immigrants, Latino, Middle Eastern, Jewish, South Indian, and Asian, as well as occupational traditions and rural community traditions. Acquired as part of the Archive of Documentary Arts.

The Duke University Center for Documentary Studies Literacy Through Photography Records comprise negatives, contact sheets, and written work (generally handwritten or printed observations, comments, stories, poems, drawings) documenting school children’s views of their community, Durham, NC. The materials would be useful to those interested in visual culture, the psychogeography of children, and Durham history, society and living environment, as well as those interested in pedagogy and developing an arts-based curriculum in public schools. The units collected and organized in the Records are LTP class projects, sorted first by format, then chronologically.

Along with the physical negatives, contact sheets, and writings transferred to the Rubenstein Library in 2002, LTP coordinators provided detailed supplementary information about the compilation, organization, and selection process of the collection, as well as a finding aid in the form of an Excel database. The Excel file is a master database of individual student projects organized by year, and sortable by other variables; the database is accessible electronically at the Rubenstein Library. A print copy of the database and other supporting documentation is also available in the RMBSCL inventory file, and should be consulted by patrons using this collection.

The collection also includes 56 exhibit-quality color prints of LTP in Tanzania include images of children learning to use digital cameras, demonstrating their literacy skills, and exhibiting their projects. Also includes images of some volunteers, LTP staff, and Tanzanian teachers.