For Librarians

Free online encyclopedia of Black Chicago and the global Black diaspora — more than 4,100 sourced entries and a photo archive, published by the Chicago nonprofit CultureTechLens. Rooted in Chicago, read everywhere.

What this is

CultureTechLens is a free online encyclopedia of Black Chicago and the wider Black world it belongs to — its people, places, music, churches, newspapers, and neighborhoods, from the South Side to the diaspora. It is published by a Chicago nonprofit. Every entry is written from sources and cited, so students, teachers, and researchers everywhere can use it.

Free, with nothing to sign

The encyclopedia, its photo archive, and its datasets are open access. There is no license, no subscription, no paywall, and no fee — for the library or for patrons. The underlying dataset is licensed CC BY 4.0, so it can be cited, reused, and built on with attribution.

Catalog it

We publish catalog-grade records your systems can ingest:

• MARC21 records — ctl-records.mrc (with a readable .mrk twin) for three resources: the encyclopedia itself (a continuing integrating resource), the Cited Photo Archive, and the CultureTechLens Black Cultural Knowledge Graph dataset.
• KBART title list — ctl-kbart-titles.csv, covering the same titles, plus the superseded 2026-10-06 dataset snapshot, flagged as superseded so it is never cataloged as current.

Record numbers CTL-LIB-001 to CTL-LIB-003 are our local numbers, assigned for this pack; no OCLC number is claimed. For the dataset, cite the concept DOI — 10.5281/zenodo.23403147 — which always resolves to the current version (version 1.3, deposited October 16, 2026).

Add it to a guide — paste-ready

This is the entry libraries are using, ready to paste into a LibGuide, subject page, or resource list:

Linking and permalinks

Link to culturetechlens.com and to section URLs such as /photos/. Individual entries carry stable permalinks of the form https://culturetechlens.com/graph/entities/ctl-e-5232/ — link to the entry a patron needs. Please link rather than mirror: the record corrects and grows in place, and a mirror freezes yesterday’s version. Citation formats (Chicago / APA / MLA) are on How to Cite Us.

A verification desk for your patrons

Reference staff can send us a claim about Black culture, history, or music — [email protected], “Verification” in the subject line — and we will check it against the evidence, free. The service runs from our press page and is open to libraries on the same terms as to journalists.

Accessibility and preservation — stated as far as they are true

The encyclopedia is published as standard HTML pages; core reading content does not require JavaScript. We make no formal WCAG conformance claim — the site has not been independently audited, and we would rather say so than print a badge. For preservation: the knowledge graph dataset is deposited in Zenodo, CERN’s repository, under a persistent DOI, and the website itself is captured by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (a capture of the homepage from October 2, 2026 is on record).

Counts, with their ledgers

Canonical master ledger (October 19, 2026): 4,111 entities / 2,527 relationships. Live site (October 26, 2026): 3,799 URLs in the sitemap; 734 photographs in the Cited Photo Archive. The two ledgers count different things — the master is the full cataloging record; the site is what is published so far — and we name the ledger whenever we state a count.

Contact

For libraries: [email protected]. CultureTechLens NFP is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (EIN 39-3143901), Chicago, Illinois.

Source: CultureTechLens