Recently, I have been doing some research for an AANB biographical article about Howard Dodson, the Chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. After a while I noticed something that became hard to overlook, the name of the Center is constantly misspelled. Why can't people spell the name of an institution that's been around for eighty years? The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is constantly being misspelled as "Schomberg.." in reference books and other scholarly works. Evidence?

I wondered about the extent of this problem so I searched New York Times historical database for "Schomberg Center," and got 41 hits! It shouldn't happen. I tried searching for this same misspelling in Lexis/Nexis major newspapers and came up with 99 hits! Then I searched L/N for magazines and journals for "Schomberg" and came up with only 7 hits -- one was a 2002 Publisher's Weekly book review. And yes, a quick scan of the results confirmed my suspicion that in each instance, the writer meant "Schomburg Center" -- the well-known research library in Harlem.

The same misspelling occurs in Gale's Contemporary Black Biography.

So I was pleased that when I searched Google for "Schomberg Center" Google responded to me Did you mean: "Schomburg Center." (Yes! Of course I did.) In harvesting the Web for this misspelling, Google retrieved 14,000 hits...so that was kind of depressing. The Schomburg Center was named after the Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Schomburg (1874-1938) who sold his collection of books, art and artifacts to the 135th street branch of the New York Public Library in 1926.

Happy 80th birthday to the Schomburg Center.

Thanks to Stephen Francoeur for reminding me about Technorati Tags. (Did I spell his name right?)

Technorati Tag misspellings

Technorati Tag research libraries

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