Athens — He is, uncharacteristically, in short sleeves. He has chucked his jacket and stands in the summer heat of an Albany pool hall, 46 years ago.

Curious young men gather. One chalks a cue stick, his eyes never leaving Martin Luther King Jr. Daylight cascades through the windows, leaving some men in shadows. He stands in a splash of light.

Rich Addicks/AJC (ENLARGE)

Toby Graham, a University of Georgia archivist, stands among hundreds of reels of film donated by an Albany television station.

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King places one hand on his hip and the other on a pool table rail. A "great movement" is happening on the streets of Albany and elsewhere in the summer of 1962, he says

"We are all together in this, a common struggle for freedom and human dignity," says King, ignoring the TV camera keeping him in tight focus. "And God bless you all."

The meeting between leader and followers took place July 25, 1962. A cameraman from WSB-TV caught the exchange, which occurred at Dick's Cue Room in Albany's Harlem community. The filmed encounter is but 5 1/2 minutes — a heartbeat in the life of a civil rights struggle that took place in movie theaters and soda fountains four and five decades ago.

It's one of the highlighted moments that form the heart of the Civil Rights Digital Library , an online compendium of the history of the civil rights movement. Compiled by primarily historians and librarians at the University of Georgia, the site debuts today.

The university's partners include Digital Library of Georgia and Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the UGA Libraries; UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences; Georgia Humanities Council and the UGA Press; Georgia Public Broadcasting; and GALILEO, the state's virtual library.

"There isn't anything out there like this," said Barbara McCaskill, an English professor whose students collaborated on a segment of the library.

The site was more than two years in the making and has cost almost $1.5 million in federal money and university funds. It features 30 hours of imagery captured by Atlanta's WSB and Albany TV station WALB taken between 1948 and 1982. Unspooled, the film would stretch almost 1,000 miles — roughly the length of the route the Freedom Riders of 1961 planned when they left Washington, D.C., for New Orleans.

The Web site also is a portal: It links users to 75 other civil-rights-related sites. They range from WGBH in Boston to Emory University, from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to the Nashville (Tenn.) Public Library.

The filmed moments — some public and well-known, others never shown outside an editing room — take viewers on a trip that focuses on events large and small, public and intimate. It includes the famous — President Kennedy scolding the Albany City Council for not observing federal desegregation law, for example. The obscure are featured, too. In one clip, a man identified only as Bert Bigelow, describes what he saw when rioters firebombed a Freedom Riders bus outside Anniston, Ala.

Much of the work has taken place in the basement floors of the Main Library, in cramped rooms where sophisticated digital equipment works in tandem with antiquated film devices to transfer old images to a new format.

"It is, literally, a library," said Toby Graham, director of the Digital Library of Georgia, an online history site based at UGA. He has headed much of the new digital library's development. "It has one foot in the film past and another foot in the digital present."

'Gold mine'

She'd heard of the film, some resting in the Main Library's sub-basement, the rest taking up a prodigious amount of space at an off-campus warehouse — miles of the stuff, recording everything from ribbon-cuttings to traffic accidents.

McCaskill, who specializes in teaching African-American and ethnic American literature, approached Graham with questions: Could her students look at some of the clips featuring the civil rights struggles? Could the segments be digitized, placed on a Web site?

Graham, who'd been considering putting some of the old clips online as part of a historical archive, thought it was a great idea. He also knew it wouldn't be cheap. In 2005, he applied for a $731,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to get the Civil Rights Digital Library under way. The IMLS awarded the cash the next year, with the understanding UGA would match the amount.

Mary Chute, the IMLS' deputy director for libraries, called the digital library "one of our prizes."

"For the consumer looking for civil rights information, this will be like one-stop shopping," said Chute.

Education and more

The library, said Graham, has a three-fold purpose.

It is an archive of filmed images that feature events from across the region, with a focus on Georgia — "Freedom on Film," included on the site, deals exclusively with civil rights issues in nine Georgia cities.

The library's portal also will show people what took place, and when, in different parts of the country. A visitor to the library could click on a link directing him to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, for example.

Third, it is a tool for teachers and students. The digital library, McCaskill said, should help students conduct original research, as well as view events that occurred years before most of them were born. "It will make civil rights come alive for them," she said.

For Graham, born in Alabama and raised in Virginia, watching the news clips has been a professional and personal epiphany. He's 38, too young to have witnessed some of the events that shaped his homeland, but old enough to appreciate the movement's impact on the country. For him, one clip stands out:

Evening has fallen on May 21, 1961. Montgomery is getting dark but is alive with movement. People have gathered in the dimly lit confines of First Baptist Church. Their faces are sheened with sweat. Some flail at the air with fans. They all sit tight in crowded pews. They offer up an old hymn:

Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms;

King, standing at a lectern, exhorts the crowd to remain bold, to have faith. And, as a he looks across the sweltering church, he reminds everyone: "We have won the moral victory."

Outside, an angry crowd gathers.