NYT runs feature on Manning Marable's Malcolm X Multimedia Study Project

I ARRIVED at Butler Library on the Columbia campus last week, showed my ID and was directed to a fifth-floor room where I could examine in person a trove of documents related to Malcolm X.

That the documents were in digital format, and I would be viewing them on a Web site, made the exercise seem a bit extraordinary. Can’t you just send me a link? I asked.

But there was a reason that I had to be invited there. The Malcolm X Multimedia Study Project was created by the late Prof. Manning Marable, whose new “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” was published last month, days after the author died of lung disease. The material I would be viewing was largely constructed around the earlier, more famous book, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” as told to Alex Haley, who died in 1992. While Columbia may have permission to share a digital version of the original copyrighted book within its campus, they certainly didn’t have permission to share it with the world.

There was another reason that it seemed fitting that I was entering a library with columns and names like Homer and Cicero inscribed above the entrance to click on a computer and open a Web browser: the brilliant online project I was viewing was slowly disintegrating, like so much parchment.

In the biography, which reached No. 3 on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, Professor Marable argues that the famous autobiography overstated Malcolm X’s past life of crime before joining the Nation of Islam and failed to discuss his political evolution toward political organizing after leaving the Nation....