Processing, Conserving, and Digitizing Ethnic History Collections for the Digital Center for Americana

FAIN: PW-50928-11

Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA 19107-5699)
Matthew Lyons (Project Director: July 2010 to December 2012)

The arrangement, description, and digitization of 21 archival collections, totaling approximately 70 linear feet, pertaining to the history of immigration and ethnicity from the colonial period through the early 2000s, with emphasis on the Philadelphia region.

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania seeks funding to arrange, preserve, describe, and digitize twenty-one manuscript collections that document ethnic diversity in the United States, with an emphasis on the greater Philadelphia region. Specifically this project aims to: a)support ethnic history research by improving access to selected high research value collections; b)increase the international visibility of HSP's significant holdings on ethnic and immigrant history; c)add 17,000 images to HSP's digital collection and shift the focus from digital "signposts" used for description to digital surrogates of whole collections with which users can conduct in-depth primary research online; d)enable HSP to implement a relatively new methodology for efficient mass digitization of manuscript materials, and build an interface and system to support it using open source software; and e)plan a user study to test the effectiveness different digitization and processing methodologies.