"Re-Collecting the Depression and New Deal as a Civic Resource in Hard Times"

FAIN: HD-50901-09

Buffalo and Erie County Public Library (Buffalo, NY 14203)
Anne E. Conable (Project Director: April 2009 to January 2011)

Development of a prototype for an open-source digital repository for materials relating to the history of the Great Depression and New Deal in western New York.

The Buffalo and Erie County Public Library seeks a Level 1 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to plan a digital humanities resource exploring the history of the Great Depression and New Deal in Buffalo and Western New York. We want to integrate digitized primary source collections, artifacts, manuscripts, oral histories, photographs, music, art, and site-specific field documentation in a community-specific multi-media digital resource. While our project will include an interactive web presence, our defining goal is a different kind of interactivity: digital humanities content-management tools that enable the resources to directly support intensive civic discussion and reflection centered in public libraries throughout our community, exploring the links between this legacy and current challenges. Though locally focused, our project will be a demonstration model of how digital humanities can help a public library mobilize collections to address the civic purposes central to its mission.