The Harry Ransom Center (HRC) at The University of Texas at Austin requests support in the amount of $245,694 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a two-year project to arrange, describe, and selectively digitize the PEN Records and share them with the global community. The story of twentieth-century political activism, persecution, and creative expression cannot be fully understood without exploring the rich materials in the PEN Records at the HRC. The archives of PEN International and English PEN offer unique insight into human rights crises and document important cultural, historical, and literary debates of the last century. They illustrate in vivid and compelling ways why the humanities are integral to questions of equality, social justice, and freedom of expression and how humanists can successfully and powerfully engage in the public square.

A planning project, conducted by the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage program, to survey small libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies in several states in the Southwest that house documentation on Hispanic/Latino history and culture, resulting in an online directory and printed publication of a guide to these collections.

The University of Houston seeks support for a Foundations-level project to identify and develop institution-level descriptions for small cultural heritage repositories in order to assess their Hispanic/Latino holdings and the conditions in which they are held, and to inform the interested community of the existence of these holdings. The proposed survey will be the basis for creating a guide to these materials and will represent a first step in making them accessible as well as improving the conditions in which they are held. The Survey of Small Historical Societies, Libraries and Museums for Hispanic Materials and Their Management will constitute an entirely free database accessible through the "Hispanic Collections" website of Special Collections and the Arte Publico Press website, both of the University of Houston.

The appraisal and digitization of audiovisual collections held by members of the Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound (MIPoPS) regional consortium, including materials documenting Pacific Northwest history, Native American languages and cultures, and the history of industry in the region. The four participating institutions would participate in training to build their capacity for the stewardship and preservation of audiovisual collections.

The urgency of digitizing audio and videotape is a critical concern for professional moving image archivists. Magnetic media tapes have a lifespan of twenty to thirty years from the date they were created; tapes in archives across the country are reaching the end of their lifespan. Based on a 2015–16 pilot program, MIPoPS is poised to address the magnetic media crisis in the Pacific Northwest on a larger scale. This grant proposes assisting four institutions with videotape in their holdings preserve a portion of their visual history, by targeting specific collections that have not been preserved or made accessible: University of Washington Ethnomusicology Archives, University of Washington Special Collections, Museum of History and Industry and Wing Luke Museum. Participants will work with MIPoPS to digitize video of high research value, creating preservation quality digital surrogates, while also providing important access to previously hidden collections.

The digitization of 5,000 items related to Ohio’s experiences of  World War I, including photographs, letters, diaries, journals, government records, posters and advertisements, leading to the creation of a statewide collection for researchers, educators, and the public.

The Ohio History Connection (OHC), formerly the Ohio Historical Society, seeks support in the amount of $171,849 for a two year Humanities Collections and Reference Resources implementation grant entitled Little Stories of the Great War: Ohioans in World War I. The goal of the project is to develop a comprehensive statewide digital collection of World War I (WWI) materials in order to increase access to and use of WWI scholarly and primary sources. Accompanying educational resources will also be developed, and the final digital collection will support upcoming commemoration efforts for the centennial of United States (U.S.) involvement in the conflict and the role played by Ohio.

The processing of Trial 9 of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals for open online access, including 18,000 pages from approximately 3,600 documents related to the Nazi mobile death squads known as the Einsatzgruppen.

The Harvard Law School Library owns and manages approximately one million pages of documents relating to the trial of military and political leaders of Nazi Germany before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and the subsequent twelve trials of other accused Nazi war criminals before the United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT) during the period 1945-9. To preserve the contents of these now-fragile documents and to provide expanded access to this material, the Library has undertaken a long-term, multi-stage digitization project, an open-access initiative to create, present and make accessible the Library's full archive to a broad audience, including the general public both in the U.S. and abroad, high school and college students, and researchers in fields related to the Trials. We are applying for funding for a one-year implementation grant to support the work required to add an additional trial—Trial 9—to the current five trials we have already completed.

This three-year project seeks inclusive repurposing of mid-century films about native peoples of the Southwest. After digitally re-mastering 60 films in the American Indian Film Gallery (AIFG) collection, we will invite native people to re-narrate the films and provide descriptive metadata in indigenous languages and English.  These "tribesourced" MP3 audio files will provide culturally-competent counter-narratives to the films, balancing the historical record by shifting the emphasis in these mid-century films from external perceptions of native peoples to the voices, understandings, and reflections of the peoples represented in the films.  Positioning the AIFG as an interactive, multimedia, multiethnic, and polyvocal site demands culturally sensitive archiving, labeling, and use guidelines; using Traditional Knowledge Systems in concert with archival best practices; incorporating tribal information in finding aids and taxonomies; native language presence in the archive as a whole.

Collaborative planning for the preservation and digitization of the Gay Alliance of Genesee Valley’s collection of oral histories, radio programs, photographs, videotapes, newsletters, and corporate papers, as well as a pilot project to digitize 174 audio and video oral history interviews recorded for the Shoulders to Stand On documentary and 33 audio recordings of the Gay Liberation Front’s “Green Thursday” radio program.

The University of Rochester River Campus Libraries and the Gay Alliance of Genesee Valley plan a joint pilot using a subset of a cultural heritage historical collection related to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) civil rights movement in Rochester, NY. Beginning with the "Shoulders To Stand On" oral histories and "Green Thursday" radio program, collaborators will conduct and evaluate pilot activities, such as transcribing, closed-captioning, and creating metadata for the material. The partnership offers a wealth of documentation on the Gay Movement's history, along with the technical/curatorial infrastructure to preserve and disseminate previously hidden archives. A strategic plan for the sustainable preservation and access of this rich collection in its entirety will result from the pilot, contributing to an inclusive history of the struggle for civil rights with hitherto undisclosed LGBT materials that will interest scholars, students, and the public.

The archival processing of the Edward B. Marks Music Company Collection, including 900 scripts, scores, and parts, as well as the digitization of up to 750 items, which would be made available through the Museum of the City of New York’s digital collections portal. The collection represents the largest group of materials on the American composer, songster, and musical theater figure George M. Cohan (1878­–1942).

The Museum of the City of New York seeks an implementation grant of $129,467 for a two-year, $259,816 project to improve stewardship of and increase public access to approximately 900 scripts, scores, and published sheet music that make up the Edward B. Marks Music Company Collection on George M. Cohan.

The digitization and free online accessibility of 800 video oral history interviews of veterans of Japanese American military units in World War II.

This is an 18-month project for digitization and segment level indexing of 800 moving image oral history interviews of Japanese American veterans who served in segregated units during World War II, while many had families imprisoned in War Relocation Authority incarceration camps. The broadcast-quality interviews, collected across the US beginning in 1998, capture the experiences of JA veterans who served throughout the European and Pacific Theaters. The videotapes will be digitized to archival standards at the University of Southern California Digital Repository. GFB has implemented a highly-searchable web-based digital platform that integrates University of Kentucky's Oral History Metadata Synchronizer and open source Omeka web publishing platform. Segment level indexing will allow researchers to search by topic and keyword and be connected to specific moments in an interview, thus eliminating research time sitting through playback to locate relevant video segments.

RINAP, which began in July 2008, has already posted online and published four volumes from the period 744-669 BCE, and will have a fifth posted online and ready for the publisher around the beginning of the proposed grant period. Its aim for the two-year period 2017-19 is to make available online all of the extant sources for Assyria's last kings, publish a sixth volume, complete work on a seventh and final volume, as well as to broaden the scope of the project's web content, making it more accessible to the general public. This will complete the work of the RINAP project.

Implementing Hellenistic Royal Coinage (HRC) is a three-year project that aims to publish fully online, for the first time, a major reference collection of 21,311 coins produced under Alexander the Great, the Seleucids of Syria, and the Ptolemies of Egypt between c. 336 and 30 BCE, and to create an extensive, open access, online typology of these coinages interlinked with critical, digitized archival resources held at the American Numismatic Society.

Planning for the preservation and digitization of 38 cubic feet of manuscripts, scrapbooks, and other materials from the papers of American folk artist Henry Darger (1892-1973).

The American Folk Art Museum is the home to the single largest public repository of works by Henry Darger (1892-1973), one of the most significant self-taught artists of the 20th century. The Darger Papers collection totals 38 cubic feet and includes his epic 15,145-page novel called "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion", other manuscripts including his autobiography and journals, scrapbooks, and 12 cubic feet of source materials used by the artist to make hundreds of large-scale illustrations for the "Realms." The manuscripts have never been published and are fragile, making access difficult and necessitating minimal handling. The grant will be used to consult with copyright and technical specialists, determine which materials will be digitized, complete a conservation survey, convene a panel of Darger scholars, and consult with digital humanities experts.

The Digital Archive of Huhugam Archaeology will contain digital copies of 1600 major archaeological reports—with 400,000 pages—on the Huhugam (Hohokam) culture of Arizona, known for its enormous irrigation systems and large, sustainable towns. Coupled with new methods of text analysis, this comprehensive archive will transform scholars' ability to answer questions about Huhugam society and will provide crucial long-term data for comparative studies. It will give Indigenous communities access to a wealth of archaeological research on ancestral populations. The general public will obtain information about this fascinating ancient culture by directly accessing the digital archive. Archive development is guided by a crowd-sourced survey and workshops designed to understand the needs of diverse users. The archive will be curated by tDAR, an established digital repository that provides free Web discovery and access to its holdings and pursues a robust program of digital data preservation.

ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries will digitize for free online public access 87,200 pages of records from the Mattachine Society and ONE Inc. that reveal hidden facets of LGBTQ American life during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

Cataloging and digitization of 1,200 original, non-fiction essays written by prisoners in the American criminal justice system.

We seek funding to support The American Prison Writing Archive (APWA), the largest and first fully searchable digital archive of first-person, non-fiction essays by incarcerated people and prison workers writing about their experience inside. Currently holding over 1,100 essays in its paper files, and gathering 1,200 more before and during the grant period, the APWA fills a yawning gap in the literature on a prison-jail system that holds 2.26 million Americans and affects millions of others. Based in first-person narratives, the APWA will re-open the prison to humanities scholars sidelined from prison studies in face of the sheer size of the U.S. prison system. It will build and maintain a national, collaborative archive serving scholarly and general audiences, and it will bring together faculty and students, library and technology specialists, and members of the larger community to develop the most innovative and sustainable digital features to serve all interested parties.

Folder-level processing and description of 831 cubic feet of records created by successive commissioners of the New York City Department of Health from 1929 through 1991.

The Municipal Archives requests Endowment support for an implementation project to process and describe a significant series of records, totaling approximately 831 cubic feet, created by successive Commissioners of the New York City Department of Health, from 1929 through 1991.  The significance of the collection derives from the pre-eminence of the City's Health Department as it defined the role and scope of public health services, not only locally, but for the entire nation.  Although the records are in good condition and the original order is intact, there is not a useful inventory or content description, and the original containers are acidic and damaging to the materials.  The purpose of this application will consist of processing the materials, creating a finding guide and identification of documents for future digitization in a second phase.  The proposed work plan specifies that all project activities will be performed in-house.  The project timetable is twelve months.

A project to investigate digitization and OCR methods for Arabic-language print materials, in order to develop workflows and digitization guidelines for Arabic-language scholarly journals. As a prototype, the project will digitize issues of the journal Al-Abhath, a quarterly publication of the American University of Beirut.

JSTOR is seeking a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Foundations grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support research on the high-quality digitization and digital preservation of Arabic-language scholarly journals. The proposed research will include the development of digitization and indexing guidelines for Arabic-language scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences, and the digitization of a small test run of Arabic-language scholarly journal issues. An important consideration in this process will be how to digitize Arabic-language texts with optical character recognition (OCR) of sufficient quality that the content can be made available for full-text searching and crawling by search engines—key prerequisites for making scholarly texts fully discoverable online. The final project deliverable will be a freely available white paper documenting the lessons learned from our investigation.

The assessment and digitization of 4,500 hours of audio recordings that trace the history and development of country and American vernacular music.

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (CMHFM) seeks support through the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program to assess the contents of its quarter-inch audio tape collection, and to digitize and make publicly accessible 4,500 hours of rare, fragile, and valuable recordings from this collection. This audio tape digitization project builds on the Museum's successful digitization of acetate transcription discs, complementing that collection with new commercial, demo, broadcast, and performance recordings that trace the history and evolution of country and American vernacular music. This pilot project will assess the full audio tape collection of 21,632 quarter-inch reels and digitize nearly 10% of the collection for preservation and public access. The project will also make a significant selection of previously-unavailable recordings accessible for humanities research through digital access and cataloging and finding aids.

A project to plan for a Website that would provide access to Performa’s archive of performance-based art works representing over 700 artists, dating from 2004 to the present. The archive includes more than 500 hours of original video recordings, 500 hours of sound recordings, over 150,000 photographs, and physical and digital ephemera such as artist renderings and curatorial correspondence documenting the production and presentation of works in Performa Biennial Visual Arts Performances.

Funding is requested to help facilitate the discovery process, planning, and prototyping towards development of a website for the presentation of materials from Performa's archive. The archive has recently been acquired by New York University's Fales Library, who will begin the process of cataloging and digitizing the archive in Fall 2016, preserving all materials for posterity and making the archive available to researchers at the Fales. Planning is underway to make the archive available via an accessible interactive digital platform for broader audiences as well. Conceived of as a "living archive" the website will encourage research and critical dialogue on interdisciplinary performance practice, fulfilling a crucial aspect of Performa's mission of providing audiences with direct access to artists and providing the intellectual tools necessary to understand and critique performance-based art and thereby interpret the artistic and cultural shifts occurring in the world around us.

The continued development of the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) with the addition of 1,300 rare, pre-1701 printed ballads held at the British Library.  In addition, the project would catalog 905 tune titles and approximately 18,250 woodcut impressions, as well as enhance access to the existing ballad collection by providing faceted searching and other features to improve the user experience.

The Univ. of California-Santa Barbara requests critical funding to launch its penultimate, 7th phase of the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), significantly expanding the archive with 1,300 rare ballads from the British Library, many unique. As always, EBBA will provide high-quality color facsimiles, text transcriptions, deep cataloging in TEI/XML/MARC, recordings, and informative essays. In this phase, we will also enhance our interface with 1) configurable, faceted searches; 2) user controls and MEI encoding of tune recordings and their transcriptions; and 3) sophisticated human cataloging of the ballads' illustrative woodcuts, matched by our existing image-association software. Additionally, we will develop a new section to support K-12 and undergraduate pedagogy, with class plans and interactive tools. EBBA will in the process widen access to these crucial cultural artifacts so that scholars, students and the general public can engage with them as text, data, art, and song.

Improved public access for the Archives of Iowa Broadcasting through the cataloging of 28,000 items and digitization of over 2,000 broadcast tapes from KWWL-TV, a flagship public news station in eastern Iowa. The collection documents the history and development of community radio and television in the state and includes oral histories, documents, photographs, and artifacts dating from 1922 to 2007.

The Archives of Iowa Broadcasting (AIB) contains oral histories, documents, photographs, promotional materials, artifacts and over 28,000 audiovisual recordings (1922-2007) that document the history and development of radio and television in Iowa. These represent a unique body of records all too often lost due to the ephemeral nature of original broadcasts and the degradation and obsolescence of the media carriers that captured them. This grant project would create an online media catalog of the more than 28,000 items in the AIB audiovisual collection. The grant would also involve digitization of 2,230 videotapes of broadcast footage from KWWL-TV, a flagship news station in eastern Iowa. Digitizing these materials will allow for their preservation.  The files will be made available online through the media catalog. Creating an online catalog of Iowa Broadcasting materials and beginning to digitize our fragile media holdings are essential to expanding future use of the AIB collection.

Cataloging, digitization, and creation of access to the archaeological collections connected to the early colonists of Plimoth Plantation.  Focusing on historical artifacts from four key sites, the project would encompass field notes, plans, drawings, and photos associated with the excavations that took place between 1940 and 1972.  Materials would be made accessible for the public, teachers, students, and scholars via an online database and finding aids.

In the years since The Mayflower made her iconic voyage, American cultural identity and heritage have developed a complex mythology surrounding the ship and her passengers. The approaching 400th anniversary (1620-2020) of this voyage has generated renewed public and scholarly interest in this time period and the Pilgrims’ daily lives. This project will digitize Plimoth Plantation’s key 17th-century archaeological collections connected to these early colonists: the RM/Clark Garrison site (C-1), the Winslow site (C-2), the William Bradford II site (C-6), and the Allerton-Cushman site (C-21). When finished, the data will be made accessible via an online catalog and finding aids designed for both the public and scholarly communities. As a result, anyone with internet access will be able to explore and learn from the primary source archaeological record and gain a better understanding of the early colonists in Massachusetts who captured the national imagination.

Completion of a database and Web platform mapping the settlement and movement of African, Native, and European populations in North America between 1500 and 1790.

The spread of Old World peoples across North America reshaped the continent and is a signal event in the making of the modern world, and yet we cannot picture the demographic revolution in any detail. Astoundingly, even after a century of professional scholarship on early America, the great transformation that remade the continent remains unmapped. Under the proposed grant, the Mapping the People of Early America Project intends to complete a population geodatabase representing early American peoples and to build a web platform that allows users to visualize and analyze the changing African, Native, and European populations in North America between 1500 and 1790. We expect that the data will become the base layer, literally and figuratively, for all future studies of early America, undertaken by humanists and environmental scientists alike. Scholars are sorely in need of this most essential of reference resources.

The preservation and digitization of 700 early, one-sheet playbills from New York theaters from 1785 to the 1880s. The Museum of the City of New York would complete the conservation, description, and digitization of its Collection of Theatrical Broadsides, ensuring the survival of documents important for the study of early American performing arts.

This two-year project will improve stewardship of and increase public access to 700 early one-sheet playbills comprising the Collection of Theatrical Broadsides. In addition to providing a record of theatrical history, these items provide diverse scholarly perspectives on New York City, and hold value for scholars interested in cultural history, as well as evidentiary documentation of day-to-day life. Dating from 1785 through the 1880s, the Collection of Theatrical Broadsides is comprised of the earliest and most fragile group of materials in the Theater Collection. If successfully funded, this project would provide for the Museum to carry out conservation on half of the broadsides, digitize 95% of the items, and catalog and rehouse all 700 objects. Upon the project’s conclusion, the digitized broadsides will be publicly searchable and freely available via the Museum’s online Collections Portal—http://collections.mcny.org—and a descriptive finding aid will be posted online.

The continued development and completion of a single, searchable database for the Arizona State Museum’s ethnographic and archaeological collections, which document 13,000 years of cultural heritage in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico.  At the completion of this phase, over 360,000 database entries would be made accessible online and linked to archival records of original excavation notes and reports.

Funding is requested to implement Phase Two of the Arizona State Museum Consolidated Collections Information System (ASM-CCIS), which is designed to ultimately migrate all ASM collection catalogs into a unified, online system. Phase Two focuses on the archaeology catalogs and will span two years with a request of $331,616 from NEH (total cost for Phase Two is $653,593). Once completed, ASMCCIS will include a single searchable database comprised of ASM’s ethnographic and archaeological collections that will be linked to our archival records of original excavation notes and reports. ASM-CCIS will be available online to students, researchers, tribal governments, and the general public resulting in greater access to ASM collections than ever before possible. This will be a major advancement in ASM’s stated mission to enhance understanding and appreciation of the cultural history of Arizona and the surrounding region.