The planning and development of an online database that would aggregate information on the historic buildings and monuments of Sicily’s Norman period, dating from 1061 to 1194.  This pilot phase would focus on the 147 monasteries that are known to have been built in this period.  The resource would disseminate three types of information: historical and site-specific data for all of the monasteries, photographic and video documentation of the 52 that survive, and any related genealogical data.

The Norman Sicily Project (NSP) digitally registers, maps and analyzes the monuments erected during the island's Norman period (ca. 1061-1194), arguably the most auspicious years in its long history. In so doing, it provides new understandings of the complex society that produced them. The project accomplishes this by joining history and earth science in a collaboration made broadly accessible by digital technologies. This application is in support of a pilot project to ensure that the best technological foundation is in place for the NSP's future development. The primary grant product will be a prototype offering access to an entire class of monuments - the society's monasteries - including images, geographic location, onomastic information, chronological data, types of attestation, gender, order, administrative rank, mother houses, dependencies, founders, dates of field visits, seismic region information and sustainability data. These data will be made freely available to the public.

The development of a web-based historical atlas containing thousands of documents pertaining to Native land transactions that involve the Miami Tribe from the late-eighteenth to early-twentieth century.  The documents represent transactions in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

The proposed project, titled Aacimwahkionkonci ‘Land of Stories,’ will synthesize primary resource materials and years of historical research on Miami Tribe land transactions into an interactive historical atlas, following resettlement patterns through three states where the Miami Nation has resided over time. As a web-based GIS and historical educational resource, the Aacimwahkionkonci Project will allow users to examine and interpret thousands of historical records, documenting how real estate left Miami Tribe ownership through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a educational tool, the Aacimwahkionkonci Project will provide tribal members, the general public, and current landowners access to this rich history and re-establish the connection between people, places and the narratives that define their interactions over time.

The cataloging and digitization of the Alden Scott Boyer collection of nineteenth century photography. This collection is a formative part of the George Eastman Museum’s photography collection, containing more than 10,000 individual photographic objects and 3,000 books, periodicals, and manuals related to photography.

George Eastman Museum will catalog, digitize and provide broad access to the Boyer collection of photography, a formative part of the museum’s photography collection. Over 10,000 objects will be cataloged and at least 29,600 digital image files will be created. The Boyer Collection is one of the most significant public collections in the U.S. for the study of nineteenth-century life, history, and culture and one of the largest and most diverse gatherings of nineteenth century British photography outside of the U.K. It is also one of the most important museum collections of vernacular photography in the U.S. Scholars, researchers and the public will benefit from online and physical access to these important materials. It is anticipated that new connections will be drawn that will illuminate a variety of humanities research topics. The project will commence in May 1, 2019 and will be completed by April 30, 2022.

A planning project to develop a digital portal to information and archival sources on Mexican American art.  The activities would lay the groundwork for establishing future partnerships with small institutions and for building a database for Mexican American art nationwide.

The University of Minnesota, The University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, and the National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA) seek an NEH HCRR Foundations grant to undertake planning efforts for an online portal, Rhizomes of Mexican Art since 1848, that will aggregate Mexican American art and related documentation from existing digital collections across the nation. Art attributed to Mexican heritage artists living in the United States is a rich aesthetic tradition that enhances how humanities scholars think about American art, history, and culture. Co-PDs Davalos and Cortez with a team of scholars and technical specialists will convene online and in-person to produce three Foundations-level outcomes: 1) a protocol by which relevant content from small-budget institutions feed into Rhizomes; 2) a curated search strategy, new metadata, and controlled vocabularies; and 3) submission of proposals for adoption of new metadata schema by the Getty Research Institute and the NMMA.

The creation of an online collection of over 65,000 handwritten survey responses containing the personal comments of American soldiers in WWII. The narrative responses would be transcribed and reunited with quantitative data from the respondents; contextual information would be added to facilitate access by multiple user groups.

Our project will make available to scholars and to the public a remarkable collection of written reflections on war and military service by American soldiers who fought in the Second World War. During the conflict, an in-house Army Research Branch surveyed approximately half a million service personnel. Survey respondents were asked about myriad topics, from the effectiveness of training to the preference of fabrics used in uniforms. Service personnel were also provided space to write frankly about any of their concerns. Until now, only by visiting Washington, D.C., could one read these 65,000-plus anonymous "free-text" commentaries. Taken together, these wartime records provide us the most comprehensive portrait of the largest citizen-soldier Army in US history. Our interdisciplinary team will reunite these one-of-a-kind free-text commentaries to their source surveys and make the entire reconstituted collection available to the public through an open-access website.

Planning for a digital archive documenting conservation and preservation work over the last 25 years at 85 historic Egyptian sites dating as early as the sixth millennium BCE, including the creation of collection management policies and manuals. The project would also support pilot work to digitize and make available archival reports, photographs, and born-digital materials for three sites: Shunet al Zebib, a third-millennium BCE mudbrick funerary complex at Abydos in Upper Egypt; the Red Monastery, a fifth-century Coptic monastery near Souhag in Upper Egypt; and the Mosque of Aslam al-Silahdar, a fourteenth-century mosque in the center of Cairo.

Covering the full breadth of 7,000 years of Egyptian history, ARCE stewards a singular archive documenting 85 projects with a concentration of materials on lost or inaccessible sites throughout Egypt. ARCE bears a responsibility to preserve this archive and share its contents. With a two-year Foundations grant, we will create and approve critical collections management policies and manuals and publish a pilot digital archive of three collections. Embedded in the planning and pilot phases are points for testing, feedback and adjustment, with guidance from a multidisciplinary advisory board and input from public audiences and other stakeholders. Publication of ARCE's materials will allow free access for educators, students and the American and Egyptian public to a wide range of digitized resources. Integrated with ARCE's website, the conservation archive will contribute to more comprehensive public understanding of cultural heritage sites in Egypt.

Digitization of 35,000 cuneiform artifacts dating from the fourth millennium BCE to the first centuries CE, for online access via Yale digital collections portals and the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative.

The project will create and disseminate comprehensive documentation for educational purposes and for research communities focused on deciphering the textual record of Mesopotamia and producing scholarship on the ancient Near East

The arrangement and description of 175 linear feet of correspondence, photographs, moving images, records, drawings, and promotional materials related to Kennywood Park, one of the nation’s longest-running amusement parks, along with the digitization of 2,000 images, 12 videos, and 750 pages.

The Heinz History Center is seeking funding for an implementation grant that will support processing and digitization of the Kennywood Park Records. The records offer researchers opportunities to explore an array of humanities topics, including cultural assimilation, popular culture, and leisure. The records amount to 175 linear feet and includes managerial correspondence, photographs, moving images, and promotional material.  The first year of the 18-month project will entail processing the collection, which will result in the records being rehoused, cataloged, and described in a detailed finding aid. The final six months will encompass the digitization of 750 manuscript pages, 2000 images, and 12 videos.  This content will be posted to Historic Pittsburgh, a regional digital library website. Dissemination efforts will include sharing bibliographic information in local and national resources, the creation of K-12 resources, blog posts, and conference presentations.

The production of an online resource on the history of eugenics in the United States, containing a privacy-protected data set on approximately 30,000 individuals who experienced involuntary sterilization, along with contextual features such as data visualizations, story lines, and thematic pathways.

We seek support for an implementation phase of a digital project piloted with a NEH HCRR Foundations grant. Eugenic Rubicon: Sterilization Stories in America will make the history of eugenics and sterilization in America accessible to a wide range of users. With an integrated collection of historical records and media assets related to the histories of involuntary sterilization in California and new materials covering North Carolina and Iowa, our hybrid collection will feature data visualizations, framing content, and digital storytelling. It will draw from an extensive dataset of over 30,000 sterilization records (approximately one-half of all known sterilizations in the 20th century U.S.) entered into a HIPAA-protected data capture system. Eugenic Rubicon is a team-based project that includes faculty, graduate students, and digital specialists, and will be developed in consultation with community stakeholders. We seek funding for two years, with an anticipated fall 2021 launch.

The digitization of 30 linear feet of archives and manuscripts pertaining to the woman suffrage movement held by member repositories of the Philadelphia Area Consortium for Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) and other institutions in the region.

The core of our work will be digitizing and describing manuscript and some printed materials documenting women working for their own and for others’ rights in the century leading up to the woman suffrage vote in 1920, held in area institutions, irrespective of the geographic focus of the collection itself. The digitized material will be served up through a robust web presence that provides access to well-described digital items; the capacity to manipulate the descriptive data to generate new scholarly products; and other resources that will serve students and scholars studying not only women’s work leading up to the 1920 vote for woman suffrage but countless other topics as well. A two-year implementation grant, beginning in 2019, will ensure that a significant portion of the material will be digitized and online prior to the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment, with collection-level records calling out those collections still to be digitized.

The preservation and availability of the papers of American author Eudora Welty (1909-2001), including conservation treatment of 60 items; digitization of selected manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and sound recordings; and the creation of catalog records to facilitate discovery of the materials.

In the proposed project staff will: ensure the long-term preservation of the Eudora Welty Collection by performing necessary in-house measures and by sending sixty pieces for treatment by a professional conservator; digitize, inspect, and compile metadata for over 13,200 selected pieces (approx. 19,800 scans); and prepare electronic records descriptions for accessing the Welty Collection, three complementary collections, and nine (9) sound recordings from the Department’s Audiovisual Collection, thus creating a digital repository of Welty materials available to scholars, teachers and other researchers throughout the world.

Development of an online version of the first (1755) and fourth (1773) editions of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, with robust search and display features for researchers in the humanities.

We seek to create an online edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language with search functionality comparable to other modern, scholarly dictionaries. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Johnson’s Dictionary was the world’s most influential English-language dictionary. It was relied upon not just by noted literary authors, but also by the authors of America’s founding documents. Many researchers still use it to determine the meanings of words from this period; it is regularly cited by the U.S. Supreme Court. Although attempts have been made to digitize the Dictionary, these are now obsolete, inaccurate, or incomplete. This project will fill that gap in three stages: first, create a searchable 1755 edition; second, create a searchable 1773 edition; third, enhance the coding in both editions. Our goal is to make Johnson’s text easy to use and to study, providing significant, long-term benefit to researchers, educators, students, and Johnson enthusiasts.

Upgrades to the Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO) database, which contains approximately 13,000 finding aids from cultural heritage institutions large and small across the state.  Improvements to the TARO portal include updating the web site interface, upgrading the underlying infrastructure, and working towards standardizing descriptive metadata such as geographic names and subject headings.

The Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO) consortium, based at The University of Texas at Austin Libraries, seeks $348,359 in funding (with matching funds of $317,457) to address our researchers’ need for improved access to TARO’s holdings. TARO is a free platform for searching finding aids for primary source documents preserved by repositories across Texas. While the site is widely known by researchers and receives millions of page views per year, its appearance and underlying infrastructure have remained static since its debut. The three-year collaborative project will implement improvements to the site’s appearance and functionality; test encoding standards updated to next-generation EAD3; work towards standardizing existing geographic names and subject headings; and provide training to TARO members. NEH grant funds will support salaries and benefits for an applications developer and metadata librarian, as well as improvements to the site’s design.

The production of 300 entries and 75 annotated guides for K-12 educators to be added to the online Colorado Encyclopedia, providing authoritative information on the state's history and culture, with new content emphasizing the history of political and civic engagement in the state.

This project is an expansion and enhancement of Colorado Encyclopedia (CE), an online reference work on the Centennial State. It builds on the successful first phase that produced a website containing 700 authoritative articles on Colorado history and culture. Twenty-five percent of them have been leveled for 4th-, 8th, and 10th-grade readers, with co-curricular resource sets for teachers. Colorado State University in collaboration with Colorado Humanities and the University Press of Colorado will produce 300 new CE essays that will enable readers to take a “deeper dive” into the encyclopedia’s humanities themes, especially with an eye toward showing the inter-connections between entries and themes.

The cataloging and annotation of 40,000 born-digital sound recordings, moving images, and photographs that document the ethnography, music, and languages of African and African diaspora communities, for access via the Atlanta University Center’s library digital repository.

The primary work for the grant period is to catalogue and annotate a large inventory of born-digital recorded sound, moving images and photographs (over 40,000 files) for posting in our open-access repository and educational YouTube channels. The scholars involved in the Africana Digital Ethnography Project (ADEPt) have gathered extensive field recordings for a decade, with more to come before the start of the grant period (May 2019). The primary means of access to the collection will be through the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library’s open-access repository currently hosted by bepress’s Digital Commons (digitalcommons.auctr.edu/adept). Early into the grant period, content in the current Digital Commons repository will be migrated to an Islandora open-source system. All entries will be indexed on Google Scholar and WorldCat. Video clips will also be available on YouTube to maximize public engagement.

Planning for a database of the Haitian art collection at the Waterloo Center of the Arts (WCA) in Waterloo, Iowa, which holds more than 1,500 works of art. The project would also support planning for the creation of the Haitian Arts Collaborative, a digital interface for Haitian art collections across the globe, including the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and the Haitian Cultural Art Alliance in Miami, Florida.

This project will complete two major tasks: First, to plan the digitization of the Haitian art collection at the Waterloo Center for the Arts in Waterloo, Iowa - the largest Haitian art collection in the United States. Secondly, we will plan an interface for considering diverse collections of Haitian art. Through the creation of these two public digital venues we hope to expand the field of Haitian art history and bring awareness to collections of Haitian art.

The digital reformatting of at-risk 16mm film and magnetic audiovisual tape in the Jane Kessler Memorial Archives at Penland School of Crafts. Films to be digitized include raw footage documenting the school and students in 1930, 1950, 1969, and 1979 and over 200 interviews, demonstrations, and workshops with notable artists and writers.

Founded in 1929, Penland School of Crafts is an international center for craft education dedicated to helping people live creative lives. Penland is at the forefront of the contemporary craft world while maintaining a strong link to its origins in traditional Appalachian culture. Penland’s history offers a complex array of values for the humanities that extend far beyond the making of things to include issues of culture, identity, place, collective work, creative process, lifelong learning, risk-taking, entrepreneurial spirit, and self-discovery. This history also relates to American history and government policies, educational and economic reform movements, and the creative economy. Penland’s archives collects and preserves unique materials that capture the rich history of the school. This proposal focuses on the digital reformatting of at-risk 16mm film and magnetic media in the Penland archives and the creation of a digital repository at Penland.

A planning project to develop a digital library that would include books of vernacular Protestant music from the southern region of the United States published between 1850 and 1925.

Sounding Spirit is a planned digital library enabling access to hundreds of influential books of vernacular Protestant music of the southern United States diaspora from 1850 to 1925. Anchored at Emory Universitys Center for Digital Scholarship, this Foundations grant application draws together four institutions with outstanding collections of these materials and diverse digitization workflows and digital repositories: Emorys Pitts Theology Library, the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music at the University of Kentucky, and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. We seek to 1.) launch a pilot site featuring twenty volumes, 2.) document processes for digitization and portal ingest that meet diverse institutional needs, 3.) draft a list of 500 to 700 volumes for a planned expanded portal, 4.) share our findings to enable comparable work elsewhere, and 5.) formalize an ongoing partnership among collaborators.

The enhancement of 6,000 records in the AFI Catalog of Feature Films, for silent films released from 1910 to 1930, as well as the upgrading of the catalog database to identify 500,000 name credits by gender, covering the first one hundred years of film history from 1893 to 1993.

The American Film Institute (AFI) upholds the first tenet of its mission -- to preserve the history of the motion picture -- through the AFI Catalog of Feature Films, an authoritative online resource documenting the first century of American film (1893-1993). AFI respectfully requests a three-year $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of a landmark project to enhance documentation for 6,000 films released from 1910 to 1930, completing the historic record of the silent era in the AFI Catalog, and, in the process, expanding scholarly and public understanding of women’s foundational role in the creation of the cinematic art form. The initiative will also include technological upgrades making possible the evaluation of the database’s 500,000 personal name credits by gender, providing previously unavailable data to inaugurate a cardinal study of gender parity in the first century of American film.

The digitization of 16,000 recordings of Mexican-American vernacular music from the Strachwitz Frontera Collection, dating from the late-1920s to the mid-1990s.

The Arhoolie Foundation is requesting a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue its successful preservation and digitization of the Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings (The Frontera Collection), the world's most complete collection of Mexican American vernacular music. This present proposal seeks to continue our work and support the digital preservation of an additional 16,000 individual performances; approximately 700 from 78-rpm discs, 5,600 from 45-rpm discs, 8,400 from 33-1/3 rpm LPs, 300 from cassettes, and 1,000 one-of-a-kind reel-to-reel master tapes from the Falcon label. The purpose of this program is to preserve this historically valuable collection and to make it accessible to students, researchers and the general public. The digitizing process involves making digital copies of the sound recordings, scanning the record label, tape boxes, LP covers and notes) and adding them to our UCLA online database.

The arrangement and description of the archives of two California women architects/planners, Cathy Simon and Karen Alschuler, of the architectural firm SMWM (Simon Martin-Vegue Winkelstein Moris), whose work impacted California design in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

A grant to preserve and make accessible significant source materials generated by architect Cathy Simon and urban designer Karen Alschuler of the firm SMWM (Simon Martin-Vegue Winkelstein Moris).

A multi-institutional planning project to develop an online portal for access to archival sources on Franco American history and culture.  The project team would also plan for digitizing Franco American sources at partner institutions and would explore linking other library and archival collections to the portal.

The Franco American Portal Project is a five-university collaboration to build a primary source discovery tool for Franco American collections. Sponsored by the University of Maine and in collaboration with the University of Southern Maine, University of Maine at Fort Kent, Assumption College, and St. Anselm College, this project seeks to create a single, bilingual, culturally conscientious, searchable portal to archival materials concerning the French Canadian diaspora in the United States. Funds will be used to create a portal that links to the five partners' in-scope archival collections; foster teamwork and partner collaboration; support outreach to solicit in-scope materials from other institutions in the United States and Canada; and develop a digitization plan for growing content for the portal.

The continued development of the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), with the addition of 1,178 pre-1701 printed ballad sheets from 101 institutions in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In addition, the applicant would catalog 923 tune titles and approximately 18,200 woodcut impressions and would enhance access to the entire ballad collection through the project’s new website, EBBA 4.0.

The University of California at Santa Barbara requests critical funding to launch the vital 8th and final stage of its digital English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) to include the 1,178 extant but as-yet-unarchived pre-1701 English broadside ballads held at 101 institutions across the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. We have reviewed the largest collections on site at 15 institutions and have procured agreements from all to include their 850 items in EBBA. This signals great enthusiasm that we anticipate will extend to the remaining institutions with smaller holdings. Keeping to EBBA standards, we will provide high-quality facsimiles and transcriptions of the ballads, granular cataloging in TEI/XML/MARC (and now MEI), recordings, visual aids, and informative essays. Finally, we will launch our new website, EBBA 4.0, which will enhance user access to ballads as texts, music, and art.

Digitizing 4,409 volumes of dime novels and story papers published by Street & Smith, a New York City firm in operation from 1855 to 1959.  A partnership among five academic libraries—Northern Illinois University, Villanova University, Stanford University, Bowling Green State University, and Oberlin College—the project would provide images and full texts of the works, catalog records for the volumes, and indexed entries for every story, series, and author, to augment an existing online bibliography of dime novels.

The Street & Smith Project seeks to digitize the dime novels and story papers of the only major publisher to survive the dime novel era. In addition to making thousands of these publications freely and widely available for the first time anywhere in over a century, the project will also add index entries for every story, series, and author to the online dime novel bibliography at dimenovels.org. This bibliography will be used to aggregate each partner’s digital dime novel holdings, while unpacking the complex relationships that exist between the dime novels themselves.

The arrangement and description of nearly 400 linear feet documenting Howard Hughes’ film career dating roughly from the 1920s to the 1970s.

The Tony Stark of his era. That is perhaps the most concise description of Howard Robard Hughes (1905-1976), arguably one of the twentieth century’s most significant visionaries. A transformative figure in aviation, business, and the history of Hollywood, Hughes established strong ties to southern Nevada during the latter half of his life, and donated his company records to the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV). The Howard Hughes Motion Picture Papers span nearly half a century and include an impressive range of heterogeneous and distinctive materials related to the art, technology, economics, and social impact of American cinema. UNLV is proposing a cross-domain Implementation project that will leverage the subject expertise of the Department of Film and the technical expertise of the University Libraries Special Collections and Archives to increase the longevity of the materials and make them known and available to the public.