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.

Revitalizing the digital architecture of the Walt Whitman Archive to make it easier to search and use the materials on the website.  Specific improvements would include changing the programming framework, creating a machine-readable interface for the website’s code, images, and metadata, revising files to improve the metadata, and leveraging existing metadata through a new search engine.

The Walt Whitman Archive (https://whitmanarchive.org) is one of the most prominent open-access digital archives, with hundreds of thousands of visitors annually, many from secondary and post-secondary schools. Now nearing its 25th year, the Archive is the leading resource for scholars of Whitman and a model for digital editions. Its depth has enabled its success, but has also created an infrastructure that is showing its age. We propose a critical redevelopment of the project's technical framework for both broad access and long-term sustainability, overhauling its information architecture, access framework, and public interface. Such a rebuild will make it easier for users to search, organize, and re-use our materials and to access it from mobile devices, and will allow more flexibility for future development. It will also serve as a model for other major scholarly resources whose digital infrastructure needs preservation, lest past investments of money, time, and energy be lost.

Expansion and development of an online resource that documents the history, people, and places of Tibet, Inner Asia, and the Himalayan region.  The project would expand the technical infrastructure of the current resource to include linked open data and would expand content by adding new biographies and geographic data.

The Treasury of Lives, an online encyclopedia of Tibet, Inner Asia and the Himalayan Region, will implement a major expansion of encyclopedia content and transition from traditional relational database tables to a Resource Description Framework (RDF) knowledge graph capable of supporting semantic queries. The Treasury of Lives will add 100 new biographies of significant twentieth century Tibetan figures and 100 geographic place description entries with dynamic mapping, as well as related family and social roles content, to the actively growing resource. This content development will coincide with the development of a data model and ontology for people and places of Tibet, all in preparation for the transition to a triple-store database and website redevelopment that will fully implement the principles of Linked Open Data (LOD).

An online statewide inventory of municipal records documenting urban renewal in New York from 1949 to 1974, to facilitate planning for the digitization of the materials.

Urban renewal was one of the most important—and controversial—domestic policies in our nation’s history. Between 1949 and 1974, the federal government spent over $7 billion to revitalize more than 1,200 cities struggling with economic and population decline. Yet—except for a handful of cities—we know surprisingly little about urban renewal’s history and legacy. This project seeks funding of $52,029 ($46,420 for the core project plus $5,609 for inter-institutional partnerships) at the Foundations level to create a statewide inventory of locally-held urban renewal records for New York State, with the ultimate goal of digitizing selected records. This inventory and eventual digital collection will improve scholarly and public understanding of the lasting impact of urban renewal in our communities.

Planning for the creation of online access to Native American language holdings at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, at the University of Oklahoma.  Planning would entail a series of workshops for tribal community members, linguists, archivists, and technology developers in order to share user needs and best practices in the design of language repositories.

The Native American Languages collection at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma is seeking funding for a collaborative project to plan the development of an online platform for the collection. The website will provide unprecedented access to the collection by allowing users to view and download materials directly, rather than the current system which requires people to visit the collection in person. This type of access fulfills our mission to make those materials that are meant to be shared as available as possible to Native peoples, researchers, and the greater public. We propose to hold a series of workshops designed to get input from NAL stakeholders (Native communities, linguists, educators), archiving professionals, and developers to create a user-oriented interface that will best serve the needs of our community of users. Information gathered from the workshops will be used to produce detailed mock-ups of the site.

The digitization, transcription, and annotation of the papers of Mississippi state governors from 1859 to 1882 to include official correspondence, military telegrams, and letters and petitions from the public.

The Civil War Governors of Mississippi Digital Documentary Edition (CWGM) is an open-access collection of nearly 50,000 documents from the state’s governors’ papers from the late 1850s through the early 1880s that will be scanned, transcribed, and annotated over the next six years. CWGM is seeking a three-year NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant to fund the first three-years of this project. Mississippi's Civil War-era governors' records capture the everyday experiences of southerners from the period just before the American Civil War through the end of Reconstruction and into the New South. The project involves a cross-domain partnership between archivists at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, digital archives specialists at the Mississippi Digital Library, and a historian-led research team at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Development of an online dictionary of Missouri artists, profiling 500 artists who were active across the state between 1821 and 1951. The resource would be developed through a partnership among three leading archival repositories in Missouri and would debut in the state’s bicentennial year.

In commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the State of Missouri, The Spencer Art Reference Library of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in partnership with the Jannes Library of the Kansas City Art Institute and The Saint Louis Public Library will make descriptive information on Missouri artists discoverable online by launching the publicly accessible digital portal, "Missouri Remembers: Artists in Missouri 1821 – 1951." The online resource will enable users to explore iconic artists like Thomas Hart Benton and George Caleb Bingham and to discover lesser known artists, such as female artists and artists of color, who lived in or spent part of their careers within the State of Missouri from the state’s beginning in 1821 through 1951. To implement this initiative, project partners will mine their large collection of files on Missouri artists to create individual descriptive records on an initial 500 artists for the portal's launch.

Cataloging and digitization of 25,000 slides taken by photographer Florence Arquin during the 1940s and 1950s that document Latin American and Caribbean heritage and culture, to be made available through a website at Florida Atlantic University.

The Arquin Slide Collection Digitization Project will digitize Florence Arquin’s collection of 25,000 slides, create descriptive metadata, archive the images and metadata, and make the collection accessible in a digital collection through a public website created with Omeka S. Online access to the collection will serve as a powerful research tool for scholars throughout the world who study Latin America and the Caribbean.

The digitization of nearly 6,000 hours of radio and television programs documenting the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community in Houston from the mid-1970s to the 2000s.

The Gulf Coast LGBT Radio and Television Digitization and Access Project proposes to digitize, transcribe, describe, and make available over thirty years of unique radio and television broadcast recordings created by and for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans communities. Drawing from UH Special Collections, and through a partnership with the Gulf Coast Archive and Museum of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender History, Inc., four series have been identified for inclusion in this project, totaling thousands of hours of content not heard or seen since initial broadcast. Currently, these materials are inaccessible to researchers, and due to the fragile audiovisual formats, are at significant risk of loss due to deterioration. These recordings are primary documents chronicling the experience of the LGBT community in a major Southern city and stand as a testament to the role of radio and television broadcast in the LGBT movement’s pursuit for social acceptance and political equality.

A planning and pilot project to establish priorities for digitizing the Stowe Center’s archival holdings and artifact collections related to Harriet Beecher Stowe, her family, and the Nook Farm neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut.  The project would seek advice from focus groups of scholars, teachers, and students; digitize and create metadata for 100 objects; develop and test workflows; and collaborate with state-wide digital platforms to ensure the collections reach a wide audience.

The collection at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center is made up of more than 13,000 published works, 195,000 manuscripts, 12,000 images, 5,000 graphic materials, and 8,500 artifacts which illustrate illustrate important themes in 19th-century U.S. history and can be studied across several disciplines.  The digitization project grew out of the Stowe Center’s desire to meet the expectations of today’s researchers for access to digital resources, update content and metadata to reflect contemporary standards, and bridge collections to programmatic needs more fully realizing our mission. This project comes at the right time for the museum – having successfully completed an NEH-funded interior renovation and reinterpretation of the Stowe House in 2017, the Stowe Center is poised with new leadership to undertake planning for collections digitization as an institutional priority.

Digitization and description of 854 original audio recordings of humanities and literary lectures given at the 92nd Street Y in New York City from 1950 to 2008.

92Y is requesting funds for the digital preservation of and increased public access to 854 tape-based audio recordings in our Humanities archive. Dating from 1956, the Humanities Audio Archive captures and features lectures, conversations, debates, and panel discussions across the fields of language arts, fine arts, performing arts, cinema, philosophy, history, and Jewish studies, as well as jurisprudence, anthropology, sociology, psychology, media studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. These recordings provide a truly distinguished record of public discourse on the questions and issues that helped define the second half of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first century in America, and feature some of the period’s most influential figures. For this stage of its large-scale media preservation efforts, 92Y is focusing on the digital preservation of its audio recordings contained on imperiled, increasingly vulnerable analog and digital tape-based formats.

The cataloging and digitization of 30,000 paper squeezes that preserve ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions, including treaties, laws, decrees, honorific inscriptions, accounts of building projects, dedications, and literary texts from Ancient Greece.

The Institute for Advanced Study seeks support to complete its project to digitize the Institute’s collection of approximately 30,000 paper squeezes of Greek inscriptions, the second largest such collection in the world. The squeezes, which are three-dimensional, mirror image impressions of inscriptions, were created and donated to the Institute by the Epigraphical Museum in Athens, the American excavation of the ancient Athenian agora, and some of the greatest epigraphers of the twentieth century. Squeezes often preserve inscriptions which have been destroyed or lost, and they increase accessibility since the original stones are often heavy and located in out-of-the-way museum storerooms. The digitization of the squeezes and the addition of metadata will preserve these delicate prized resources; make them accessible online for free and unlimited use by researchers, teachers, and students worldwide; and enhance the study of primary sources for every aspect of Classical culture.

The cataloging and digitization of the Mirskey Collection, a set of approximately 3,000 cinema scores published during the early motion picture era, dating from ca. 1895 to 1927.

The University of Pittsburgh Library System (ULS) seeks a grant to support the Mirskey Collection Digitization Project. This two-year project will process and digitize sheet music for silent [mute] film accompaniment in the Mirskey Collection (MC), held by the ULS Theodore M. Finney Music Library. The MC contains approximately 3,000 sets of “photoplay” music, or music published specifically for cinema orchestra, with each set averaging fifteen instrumental parts, for a total of approximately 45,000 pages. Music for silent film accompaniment is an important resource for humanities scholars and musicologists exploring media studies, popular music, historical art music, gendered activities, class and social stratification, and a variety of other areas. Yet, silent film music remains very difficult for scholars and performers to access. The proposed project will preserve the entire MC and make it freely available online for research, performance, public programming, and exhibition.

The digitization and geolocation of maps, architectural drawings, reports, and related photographs to address humanities questions about concepts of desegregation, urban renewal, and racial distribution over time with regard to housing and schools.  The Mapping Urban Fracture project would create a virtual collection comprising approximately 700 new reports and maps created after 1989 and develop an access interface to research spatial segregation with meta- and geospatial data.

The Mapping Urban Fracture project will engage scholars, educators, and the general public through the digitization and geolocation of maps, architectural drawings, reports, and related photographs to address humanities questions about concepts of desegregation, urban renewal, and racial distribution overtime with regard to housing and schools. The project will create a virtual collection and develop an access interface to research spatial segregation with meta- and geo- data for broad dissemination to a variety of audiences.

Providing access to a collection of oral history interviews about Yiddish language and culture through transcription, the creation of time-coded indices, and descriptive metadata enhancement.

The Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project seeks funding to enhance access to its digital collection of video oral histories about Yiddish language and culture in the non-ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. With this grant, we will create time-coded transcripts and bilingual indices for a large portion of our continuously growing collection, thereby increasing multilingual access to this unique archive. Additionally, we will align geographic and subject metadata to widely used formats and link the oral history collection to related digital collections at the Yiddish Book Center. Finally, we will make the archive discoverable on major scholarly search platforms and allow for integration into universal digital libraries alongside other humanities resources. These efforts enable researchers, educators, artists, and the general public to more easily access and utilize these invaluable primary source materials about the culture of an important ethnic minority in the US and beyond.

A plan for metadata standards, accessibility, user needs, and long-term strategic planning and sustainability for Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center’s collections, as well as the pilot implementation of a digital collections management system and online collections portal with approximately 1,000 digital items.

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center requests $50,000 to develop a pilot project creating online access to a part of its permanent collection. This will be an invaluable resource for scholars studying Black Mountain College’s history and legacy as it includes the creative output of groundbreaking figures in American culture from 1933 to the present, across visual, performing, and literary arts. Outputs for this planning period will include development and population of the back-end and front-end of a new collections management system, and documents detailing strategies and standards for future implementation. An earlier related phase, funded by the Luce and Windgate Foundations, involved the digitization of BMCM+AC resources which will be used as pilot data and media for the online collections portal. The project will take place from June 2021-September 2022. Full implementation at a later date will entail digitizing and adding the rest of the collection.

Digitization of approximately 25,000 three-dimensional objects that represent 350 years of history in Philadelphia, including historical artifacts and fine and decorative arts. The images and associated metadata would be available to the public through an online database.

In an unmarked warehouse in a former industrial area of Philadelphia, the 133,000+ items that made up the collection of the now-shuttered Philadelphia History Museum (PHM) await discovery. Through a partnership with the Museum trustees and City of Philadelphia, Drexel University is becoming steward of this collection, called the Atwater Kent Collection (AKC). As the new steward, Drexel is planning an innovative model of a “museum without walls” that will allow the public to know—for the first time—the extent of what is included in this far-ranging, priceless Collection. As essential underpinning for long-term public programming, education, research, and institutional collaboration, this significant Collection of material culture must be accessible—particularly online. As part of this ambitious undertaking, Drexel is applying for a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Implementation grant to digitize the three-dimensional objects of the Atwater Kent Collection.

The reformatting and annotation of 500 oral histories of African Americans from the Gulf South, representing the stories of people who lived through the transatlantic slave trade up to the present day, as well as the development of a new web search interface and 150 curriculum modules for K-12 educators.

An interdisciplinary collaboration between UF Linguistics, Oral History program, and George A. Smathers Libraries will reanimate 500 interviews with African Americans in the Gulf South, a population absent from many other oral history collections, with rich annotations and a web-based customizable interface. Our design harnesses computational linguistic methods and is informed by the needs and expertise of three diverse user groups, resulting in a host of improved accessibility outcomes. For education, teachers will be provided an easy to use interface to enhance student engagement with localized curriculum using the interviews. For linguistics, researchers will have access to an unprecedented amount of spoken African American data to investigate African American language change and regionality, and racially-based biases in speech technologies. Finally, oral history programs across the country will be offered a new means of enhancing accessibility into their own archival collections.

The cataloging, digitization, and dissemination of approximately 35,000 avvisi, which were early modern manuscript newsletters, via the Medici Archive Project’s Medici Interactive Archive platform.

The main objective of the AVVISO Project is to digitize, preserve, catalog, edit, contextualize and disseminate the 35,000 early modern manuscript newsletters, known as avvisi, which were part of the Medici collection and are now housed at the State Archive in Florence.

The preservation and digitization of 91 bound volumes and oversized flat materials that document the work of the People’s Relief Committee for Jewish War Sufferers (1915-1924), an American Jewish organization that sought to help Jewish communities and individuals in Europe during and after World War I.

The American Jewish Historical Society is seeking funds for the digitization and preservation of 91 volumes of archival materials documenting the history of the People’s Relief Committee for Jewish War Sufferers. The PRC was a very effective grassroots fundraising and advocacy group, initiated in the aftermath of World War I in order to send funds and relief to their Jewish brethren in Europe. While the PRC was relatively short lived, it was critical in the development of successor organizations, and the collection documents the work of the PRC and their collaborations nationwide and internationally.

Digitization of 292 items related to the first naturalized American citizen elevated to sainthood, Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917), an Italian-American Roman Catholic nun. 

The Digitizing America’s First Citizen Saint Project is a three-year project that will provide digital access to the papers and artifacts of the first naturalized American citizen elevated to sainthood, Frances Xavier Cabrini. The output of the project will be digitized images of approximately 290 items, which include manuscripts, volumes of bound materials and scrapbooks, photographs, as well as a publicly accessible online OMEKA exhibit. This collection and exhibit have high research value as they document the life and work of this significant figure and reveal the history, religious landscape, and immigrant milieu of the 19th century United States. Once completed, this project will contribute significant content and context to understanding Cabrini’s life and contribution to American history and America’s religious history and allow for new scholarship relating to issues of immigration, education, social services, anti-Catholicism, and women’s leadership.