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The Black Belt of the Deep South with rural areas in the states of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi has historically faced challenges that come with rural isolation, limited industry and financial services, poor healthcare options, and lack of educational opportunities. In the early 1990s, some institutions of higher education, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities, sought to increase educational opportunities for African Americans living in these areas. This chapter provides a historic case study of a doctoral education program that was founded to increase the number of education leaders, especially African Americans with advanced degrees, who would work in Alabama. As a historic case study, it provides a general overview of the founding of the program including mission and vision, a retrospective of the types of opportunities provided to doctoral students, and reflections on ways in which the program has improved the students' professional practices from both faculty and students. One component of this retrospective is to trace those students living in and working in the Alabama Black Belt. A key understanding undergirding the importance of this work is that as school administrators educational knowledge levels increase, so does the personal knowledge base that they can contribute to the communities in which they live and work. In this way, the educational reach of the doctor of education program leads to improvements in the larger Alabama Black Belt through both community and P-12 school interactions.

This research underlines the usefulness of Civil Rights Geographic Information Systems (CR-GIS) for understanding the social struggles and assessing the critical needs of the disempowered population of Alabama’s “Black Belt.” The social struggles have been persistent for decades in the Southern states, particularly in Alabama. Researchers have recognized the political and historical root causes and implications for these social struggles. The geographic region of Alabama’s Black Belt is significant because it became the epicenter of the Civil Rights struggle and still represents the vestiges of the social policy known as “Jim Crow.”

Although GIS has a great potential to explore social and political struggles, currently, it is not profoundly associated with Civil Rights studies. This research employs CR-GIS to illustrate the impact of the disfranchisement caused by biased geopolitics in three selected cases/issues: (1) gerrymandering and voting rights, (2) transportation, and (3) poverty in the State of Alabama. While there has been some progress in overcoming the social struggles in the Black Belt, there is a need for qualitative and quantitative analyses to understand persistent social, economic, and Civil Rights struggles in the region. GIS could be a valuable tool to understand and explore the social struggles in the disempowered communities of the “Black Belt” in Alabama. By incorporating the existing information and conducting ground truth studies, this research will lay the basic foundation for extended research by creating a policy template for empowering the disempowered for better social, economic, and political integration in the “Black Belt region.”

This book chapter represents a case study relating to the challenges that immigrants encounter in their host countries and the approaches they adopt to acquire better life circumstances. The researcher implemented a qualitative research method by performing thematic analysis of the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice (ACIJ) website, social media sites, and other related websites. ACIJ is a social justice organization that assists and advocates for immigrant rights. This analysis utilized the Strategic Diversity Manifesto framework (SDM) to analyze the existent communications of immigrants who arrive in Alabama from different backgrounds to determine whether the ACIJ is applying equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) and also to determine if it is allowing these immigrants full access to its’ services and resources. Applying critical race theory (CRT) to dismantle the problems of white hegemonic racism, which is socially and historically constructed and represents cultural power in the American community. This project offers a valuable contribution to Library and Information Science (LIS) by enabling these migrants to express their voices; obtain inclusion that dismantle the hierarchical structures; and fight against violence and power, leading to improved life experiences in Alabama and to a substantial change within the Alabamian community through boosting racial and social justices.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted every community across the globe, but the global COVID-19 data show that the United States remains the most affected country where well over 666,000 people died, and approximately 40 million citizens became ill due to the virus' spread by mid-2021 (CDC, 2021). It is also noteworthy that extreme racial disparities in rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths are high in the United States, specifically among African American population. This situation is particularly evident among African American population in Alabama's Black Belt. Subsequently, COVID-19, racial disparities, and health inequalities have become central to the national and regional conversation. This chapter examines the associations between COVID-19, social determinants of health, and the systematic health disparity in African American population in Alabama's Black Belt region using Geographic Information Systems and the concept of uneven spatial development. Understanding the relationship between COVID-19 and these disparities within a spatial context vital to developing pathways to overcome the pandemic's effects and combat the systemic discrimination in this region. The derived policy recommendation could apply to other regions experiencing social inequality and health disparity.

The acceleration of Opioid deaths over the last decade has made it a serious national public health crisis. Alabama has not been immune to this epidemic, with dramatically increased age-adjusted drug overdose death rates. These increases have occurred in a state with limited resources for Opioid health prevention, treatment, and recovery services. This chapter introduces the term “o-CHIL” in order to better understand the multi-factorial layers of intertwining health injustices (in the plural) experienced in Alabama’s communities and their embedded public libraries. It highlights the complexities in Opioid consumer health information literacies, the culturally situated dimensions of the Opioid crisis in Alabama, and the uniquely relevant consumer health literacies in its public libraries. Findings are based on an empirical assessment of representative information support services identified in February 2020 on the websites of the 230 public libraries listed as members of the Alabama Public Library Service. The exploratory study applies website content analysis to identify seven examples of information offerings and to class offerings into three categories: (1) information sources (collections, resources); (2) information policy and planning (assigned Opioid-related role, strategic representation); and (3) connections (internal, external, news and events). The discussion potentially provides new directions, approaches, and opportunities to build collaborations of sharing within Alabama’s network of public libraries and beyond for them to better serve their local and regional communities impacted by the Opioid crisis.

This paper aims to summarize a three‐year federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to create a statewide digital collection.

This paper describes the Cornerstone Project: its background, the processes used to determine appropriate standards, guidelines, and best practices for digital collections, the technology selected for the digital production centers and the web portal, and its plans for the future. The project is a collaborative statewide initiative to make unique historical treasures from Alabama's archives, libraries, museums, and other repositories electronically accessible to Alabama residents as well as students and scholars around the world.

The project has demonstrated a successful model for statewide collaboration among all types of repositories. NAAL member institutions are helping other repositories create digital collections of unique Alabama historical resources.

The Cornerstone Project offers practical procedures that can be replicated by any consortia considering distributed digital collection building.

The project offers training to help librarians, archivists, and other staff successfully plan, implement, and complete digitization projects. Three shared digital production facilities at the Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH), Auburn University, and The University of Alabama serve as training centers and assist with local digitization efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the image and familiarity of Alabama as a tourism destination. More specifically, this study examined the difference in perceptions between visitors and non-visitors using quantitative and qualitative data to identify strengths and weaknesses of the image of Alabama.

This was a quantitative study with some qualitative aspects to it. This study examined both prior visitors and non-visitors of the state to compare their familiarity, image, and visit intentions. Data were collected online and analyzed using t-tests and importance-performance analysis.

The qualitative results revealed the predominant difference between people who have visited Alabama (visitors) and those who had never visited (non-visitors) was their image or lack of image of Alabama. Non-visitors had no image or characteristic that came to mind when asked about their image of Alabama, while people who had visited noted beaches the most positive image.

To date, the image of Alabama as a tourism destination has never been explored in academic research. This study has strong implications for destination marketing organizations of the state of Alabama.

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain whether or not there are differences between college students in Alabama and Hawaii based on three questions: are students concerned about the present/future? What do students know about sustainability? Who is responsible for sustainability?

Two approaches were used to address these questions. First, a summary of sustainability efforts at universities in Alabama and Hawaii is provided. Second, a random sample of 406 undergraduate students at two universities in Alabama (n=258) and at a community college in Hawaii (n=148) were surveyed.

The data indicate that sustainable programs and practices are being implemented on a number of college campuses in Alabama and in Hawaii. Students surveyed in both states are concerned about wasteful consumption and pollution. Respondents' were similar in their self‐assessed knowledge about sustainability. Respondents were also similar in their views about who is responsible for sustainability. However, a consistently larger proportion of Hawaii respondents expressed concern for and willingness to participate in sustainable practices. So, there seems to be little or no “knowledge gap” when it comes to campus sustainability, but there does seem to be a “commitment gap.” Possible reasons for this are discussed.

Since the 1980s, many universities in the USA have elected to incorporate sustainability practices into campus development and day‐to‐day operations. They are now emerging as environmental leaders and innovators. An understanding of students' perceptions of sustainability may give insight into whether or not and how they are likely to engage in sustainable practices.

To date, only two counties in the United States have filed for bankruptcy protection: Orange County, California (1994) and Greene County, Alabama (1996). This case study pertains only to Greene County. Although economic decline due to a loss of gaming revenues was involved, financial mismanagement was the primary causal factor for Greene County’s fiscal stress. This research chronicles an impoverished rural Alabama county whose legislative and administrative decisions resulted in its fiscal stress and municipal bankruptcy. The Greene County bankruptcy case was closed in 1999 and the County continues to operate under a fiscal recovery plan. However, the County has yet to comply with the miscellaneous provisions of the bankruptcy plan that could improve the financial management of the County.

Peer Support Specialists (PSS) play an integral role in substance use disorder treatment and aftercare services. PSS training programs vary in format and need to be evaluated for continued improvement. The purpose of this study was to gather feedback about course delivery and instruction from PSS trainees in a PSS training program in Alabama.

Focus groups were conducted with 15 PSS trainees after they completed two training courses delivered in an online university format. There were four men and 11 women. Four were black, 10 were white and one was Hispanic/Latinx. Participants ranged in age from 20 to 70.

Through content analysis of focus group content, four themes emerged: (1) issues with online navigation, (2) desire for an orientation to university-level education, (3) instructor qualities (e.g. approachability and availability) and (4) course structure considerations (e.g. balance between online and in-person learning, more frequent class meetings).

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to evaluate a new PSS training program in Alabama. Findings help inform future PSS training programs and assist in the development of best practices in PSS training.