In 2008 Tom Smith took a practicum course called The Power of Place, taught by Melanie Shell-Weiss through the <a href="http://krieger.jhu.edu/africana">Center for Africana Studies</a>. The students recorded oral histories of residents of Baltimore's Middle East neighborhood for the East Baltimore Oral History Project (EBOH), which they later assembled into a <a href="http://eboh.jhu.edu/oralhistoryplayer/">digital audio archive</a>. The course led Smith to think about how to integrate the recordings with their lengthy transcripts. In addition to the interviews he conducted for the class, Smith eventually built the player software featured on the project website. The software that he developed is open source, so anyone can use it without having to pay license or royalty fees. Smith’s company, ESDA LLC, can implement the software on a contract basis for those without the expertise to do it in-house.

<a href="http://morgue.afro.com/AfroArchon/" target="_blank"><img title="jhu_project photo_afro" alt="" src="http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/jhu_project-photo_afro.jpg" width="638" height="425" /></a> Unprocessed boxes of archival material, Baltimore <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em>, 2008.

Smith’s research on practical archival problems brought him into contact with Moira Hinderer, the project manager for the <a href="http://magazine.jhu.edu/2011/11/unboxing-history/">Diaspora Pathways Archival Access Project</a> (DPAAP), a partnership between the Baltimore <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em> and Johns Hopkins University. DPAAP focuses on organizing and preserving the archives of the <em>Afro-American Newspapers;</em> they have worked on the newspapers’ <a href="http://morgue.afro.com/AfroArchon/">morgue collections</a> as well as personal papers and institutional records. Hinderer, who is also a lecturer in the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins, teaches classes in which students work directly with the <em>Afro</em>’s archives. Smith watched Hinderer's students and archival interns involved in the painstaking labor of flatbed scanning and wondered if this process could be made more efficient. The time and expense involved in the digitization of delicate archival materials at the <em>Afro</em> prompted Smith to invent another tool: the <a href="http://projectgado.org/">Gado scanner</a>.