Funded Projects Query Form
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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.

The Abbe Museum is requesting funding through the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Foundations program to collaboratively develop and assess processes, systems, tools, and workflows to connect traditional cultural knowledge to Wabanaki collections at the Abbe Museum. These processes and tools will at the same time enable Native communities to reclaim control over access to and use of their cultural heritage. This project is a critical part of decolonizing our collections care, management, and interpretation practices at the Abbe Museum. It will add invaluable information that significantly increases the cultural and intellectual relevance and value of a unique humanities collection.

A Foundations planning project to preserve and process a collection of papers and memorabilia associated with the writer Ray Bradbury.

The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies houses a lifetime of the author’s literary works, artifacts, library, correspondence, typescripts, photographs, awards and mementos, recordings, and juvenilia, nearly 30,000 pounds of materials in all. Most of these thousands of documents and artifacts are fragile and disordered, requiring the kind of consultation and planning outlined and requested in this grant application. The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies requests HCRR Foundations grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to bring in expert consultants from peer research centers as well as local consultants who will provide guidance in archival accessioning, artifact preservation, database documentation, digital imaging, public outreach, and collections management. A central outcome will be a formal Preservation Plan that will support, describe, and provide guidelines for the project, reported and disseminated through a white paper and future public access to the archive.

Processing a collection of approximately 170,000 photographic negatives from LOOK magazine, including cataloging, copyright research, evaluation, and creation of 8,500 reference scans.

This eighteen-month project is part of an ongoing endeavor to provide access to the LOOK Collection, which includes photographs for 2,242 stories from 41 different photographers made between 1938 and 1968 for LOOK magazine, and vividly documents the cultural transformation of the nation from World War II through the Cold War era. Rather than continuing to focus efforts solely on digitization, the Museum determined that the next phase of this project should be to process the collection as a unit. This project will continue our progress toward increased public access to photographs from the LOOK Collection through processing, assignment level cataloging, copyright research, and evaluation.

Conservation and digitization of 62 rare and unique volumes of “language of flowers” literature published in the United States and Europe during the 19^th century, to be made publicly available via the Biodiversity Heritage Library. 

The Chicago Botanic Garden’s Lenhardt Library seeks to conserve, digitize, and disseminate 62 rare and fragile language of flowers volumes. The project will create and sustain free, public access to the culturally significant works, providing insights into 19th literature, gender roles, and botanical culture. Two contracted vendors, ARTEX, a fine art shipper, and the nationally recognized Northeast Document Conservation Company, will ship, conserve, and digitize the works to the highest professional standards. Library staff will inspect the work, assign metadata to digital pages and images, shelve conserved volumes in a secure rare book room, and upload digitized content to the Biodiversity Heritage Library, an open access repository of biodiversity literature facilitated by Smithsonian Libraries. Staff will broadly disseminate the grant products through rare book viewings, exhibitions, lectures, Public Library Days, youth programs, social and legacy media, and the Garden blog.

A Foundations planning project for preservation of and access to a digital biographical encyclopedia that documents the lives of prominent religious and cultural leaders of the Tibetan/Himalayan region from the 11^th to the 20^th centuries.  Planning would address improvements in data management, editorial standards, search optimization, and public engagement for the online encyclopedia.

The Treasury of Lives is seeking a Foundations grant in order to plan for the long-term sustainability of our open access born-digital biographical encyclopedia of Tibet, Inner Asia and the Himalayan Region. Working closely with consultants, experts in their fields of Library Science, Data Science, Geographic Information Systems, and the Humanities, the team will develop a robust framework for data discovery, cataloging convention, categorization, and searching, while also planning for long term storage and preservation of the growing resource that is accessed by 6000 users monthly. Based on the knowledge gained over the grant period, the project will culminate in a discussion of how similar organizations can work together to create unified standards and share knowledge. The proposed project will be carried out over 18 months and consist of regular meetings with specialists who will collaboratively assess our current systems and make recommendations for protocols going forward.

A project to process and upload approximately 10 art journals and 1,500 documents by notable Latin American and Latino artists, critics, curators, and historians into a digital archive that integrates artists’ sketches and notes, lectures, manuscripts, correspondence, and newspaper articles documenting 20^th-century Latin American and Latino art. A new database and user interface would improve the functionality of the resource.

Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art: A Digital Archive and Publications Project is a multi-year, multi-million dollar project dedicated to the recovery and publication of critical primary source documents related to Latin American and Latino art. This initiative addresses the endemic lag in the field of Latin American/Latino art history, research, and teaching by providing access to writings by artists, artistic groups, critics, and curators from North and South America. The project’s Digital Archive provides users free, universal access to a database of thousands of primary source documents that are fundamental resources for Latin American and Latino studies."Beyond Recovery-A Collaborative Expansion of the ICAA Documents Project Digital Archive" is a long-term strategic approach to utilize collaborative partnerships to move the project into the 21st century, ensuring the Digital Archive’s operational advancement and future relevance.

Transcription of 363 oral history interviews from the Iowa Labor History Oral Project and completion of a comprehensive digital index.

Indexing the Iowa Labor History Oral Project is a two-year initiative to transcribe and index oral history interviews from the Iowa Labor History Oral Project, an over forty-year-old statewide oral history collaboration that has to date produced more than one thousand audio interviews with Iowa workers. The grant will fund the transcription and auditing of 363 interviews and the creation of individual (transcript-level) indexes for 326 of these same 363 (excluding those interviews without releases). The grant will also provide for the digitization of an existing print index to over 750 interviews and integrate the 326 new interview indexes to create a complete and expandable ILHOP Digital Index (IDI). Building off an ongoing digitization initiative funded by the National Historical Preservation and Records Commission (NHPRC), the grant will set the stage for future growth, dissemination, and access opportunities for one of the most important resources in twentieth-century Midwestern history.

Cataloging and digitization of archaeological collections from the Flowerdew Hundred site, a major 17^th-century plantation in the Virginia Tidewater region.  Artifacts, site records, maps, and photographs would be integrated into the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery, where they would be made publicly accessible along with materials from approximately 80 other slavery sites in the Atlantic and Caribbean region.   

The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery, in collaboration with the University of Virginia Library, will identify, catalog, digitize, and make accessible to diverse stakeholders collections from four of the earliest and most significant 17th-century archaeological sites at Flowerdew Hundred, a thousand acre plantation near Jamestown, Virginia. The occupations of these four sites span a dynamic period of settlement and agricultural expansion in the region. Fifteen of the first 25 enslaved Africans imported into British North America lived at Flowerdew Hundred by 1619. They joined indentured Europeans, neighboring Weanock Indians, and European landowners in shaping mid-17th century plantation settlements. By making accessible a vital part of the limited material record of the social and economic struggles that comprised the 17th-century Chesapeake, this project will provide data to address complex questions about a critical period of America’s development and survival.

A project to catalog 2,061 cuneiform clay tablets written in seven languages from the site of Tell Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit, in modern-day Syria. The project would also transliterate and translate 1,887 tablets into English and make all catalog information, transliterations, and translations available online.

Digital Preservation of Archival Tablets from the Syrian Kingdom of Ugarit will catalog the archival clay tablets written in the cuneiform script excavated at the Syrian site of Tell Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit (c. 1350â??1185 BC) and make their contents freely accessible in digital form via The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative and Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus. These historical witnesses (letters, economic texts, legal contracts, records of state) document the daily life of a cosmopolitan Syrian city that flourished over three millennia ago, but they are now threatened by the ongoing crisis in Syria. The project will highlight museum registration information for all 2,061 archival tablets and transliterate (transcribe the cuneiform script into the Roman alphabet following scholarly conventions) and translate the 1,887 published texts. The catalog, transliterations, and translations will provide a complete digital record of these imperiled cultural artifacts.

The digitization of 66,000 photographs produced by the New York City Board of Transportation before and during construction of the New York subway system from 1900 to 1950, documenting people, buildings, streetscapes, and the construction process throughout the subway network across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.

The New-York Historical Society will digitize its Subway Construction Photograph Collection, dating from 1900-1950 and numbering 66,000 images, and make them publicly available through the use of its new Islandora digital portal, N-YHS Digital Collections, the Digital Public Library of America, and WorldCat. The photograph collection documents the construction of New York City's subway system in four boroughs including Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens. The collection also documents the face of the city, including its built environment, streetscapes, and people during the first half of the 20th century. Many of the photographs are works of art completely unknown to researchers and the public alike. The digitized collection will facilitate their use for educational and scholarly purposes. The images will include enhanced metadata as well as geo-coding with latitude and longitude information.

A Foundations pilot project to transcribe materials in Mixtec, a pre-Columbian language spoken in south-central Mexico, and that are housed at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America.  Working with undergraduate linguistics students and Mixtec community members who have migrated to southern California, the applicant would undertake transcription of hand-written documents and audio recordings to make them searchable, thereby improving access and reuse. 

The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) has thousands of images of handwritten manuscripts whose text cannot be searched, making them difficult for users to discover and access. Since many of these documents are transcriptions or translations of recordings in AILLA's collections, improving access to a manuscript increases access to other media. This project pilots a low-cost process to improve access to resources in AILLA's collections by crowdsourcing the transcription of select handwritten documents written in Mixtec languages using open-source software. It will be implemented in an undergraduate linguistics course at UT, for which lesson plans will be developed, and within a Mixtec speech community in California, in an effort to develop a community of practice. More broadly, investigators will disseminate findings among other digital archives so they may adapt the approach to any language.

The conservation treatment and digitization of eight volumes (3,566 pages) of Moravian Church records focused on missions on the Caribbean islands of St. Croix and Antigua from the late 18th through the mid-20th centuries.

The Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pa. (MAB) is seeking a HCRR Implementation grant of $265,359 to preserve and digitize selected records from the Eastern West Indies (EWI), held by the Moravian Archives and based on existing guidelines for prioritization of treatment and digitization. The goal of the project is 1) To provide conservation treatment for these selected records in order to allow future use of these records 2) To digitize these records 3) To provide wide public access to their content by uploading the digitized material to an appropriate digital platform.

A Foundations project to preserve and create access to 700 audiocassette tapes of Alaskan Iñupiaq elders, recorded between 1976 and 1981, that document native lifeways during a period of rapid cultural change.  The collaborative project includes training, digitization, cataloging, long-term storage, and creation of online access to the original recorded narratives, speeches, and musical works.  It would establish a collaborative process for native Alaskan organizations to preserve at-risk audio recordings.  

Aqqaluk Trust Alaska Native Voices (ATANV) is a collaborative effort to preserve and provide access to 700 unique Alaska Native Elders’ cassette tapes recordings. These primary source materials document the Iñupiaq “Spirit Program” from 1976-81 which records firsthand descriptions in Iñupiaq of essential indigenous Northwest Alaskan survival skills and moral maxims. The lifeways described are now largely historical, yet the Spirit Program forms the bedrock of present-day Iñupiaq values. Stored in extremely high relative humidity conditions on the Northern Alaska coast for the past 36-41 years, these tapes are now at risk from magnetic tape failure or ever-present threats from the natural environment. The ATANV project hopes to provide these historic audio tapes with preservation and digital access before they are lost, providing cataloging and online access to the digital files while storing the originals in environmentally controlled conditions.

Digitization of around 17,000 items including paper materials, historic photographs, video recordings, and cultural objects from collections held by six community archives in the L.A. as Subject research alliance.

The L.A. as Subject Community Histories Digitization Project will make publicly accessible via the USC Digital Library and Digital Public Library of America collections held by 6 community archives from the L.A. as Subject research alliance: the Filipino American Library, the First AME Church of Los Angeles, the Go for Broke National Education Center, the Pasadena Museum of History, the Southern California Library, and the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum. The 6 collections document the experiences of post-WWII Filipino immigrants; videos of 400 sermons by Rev. Dr. Cecil "Chip" Murray at a socially engaged African-American church in South Los Angeles; firsthand perspectives of Japanese-American WWII veterans in 1,100 video oral history interviews; the daily lives of late 19th and early 20th century African-American, Asian-American, and Latino communities; and Jewish women's groups. The project will publish 2,950 hours of video and 15,000 photos and pages of paper materials.

A three-year project to capture digital images of approximately 1,850 artworks representing the museum’s diverse international collections, develop digital content, and upgrade infrastructure associated with its collection management system. Newly digitized materials would be freely available through a redesigned website.

The San Antonio Museum of Art provides transformative experiences for its annual 130,000 visitors and 20,000 students through its collection, special exhibitions, and 1,175 programs. Since opening in March 1981, the Museum’s permanent collection has grown to over 30,000 works of art spanning 5,000 years of history, from Egyptian antiquities to contemporary Australian Aboriginal art. Currently, the Museum’s collection is almost exclusively beneficial to visitors to the physical campus, mostly residents of Central and South Texas and travelers to San Antonio. To continue to fulfill its mission and reach the broadest audience possible, the Museum would like to make its collection available in an online searchable database. A grant of $350,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities would allow the Museum to take the necessary steps to digitize its collection and make it globally accessible.

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 digitization of 76,600 pages of annotated printed books dating from 1472-1814.  The selected pages have extensive contemporary (or near-contemporary) manuscript additions, which include reading notes, proofreaders’ and/or printers’ marks, scholarly commentary, drawings, and pen trials.  In addition, 279 original catalog records would be created for the annotations, and the digital content would be made accessible through Calisphere, the California Digital Library’s website, as well as through the Digital Public Library of America.

UCLA's Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies, which administers the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, seeks to produce and make freely available on the Internet digital facsimiles of 76,600 pages—containing more than 2.5 million (2,500,000) handwritten words—of the Clark's copiously or extensively annotated printed books from the hand-press era. The facsimiles will be hosted by the California Digital Library (CDL) on its website, Calisphere. Metadata about and links to the facsimiles will be harvested by the Digital Public Library of America and be freely available to other sites and scholarly endeavors. Complete sets of the 600- or 400-dpi TIFF files created by the project will be archivally stored by both the UCLA Digital Library and CDL. Metadata already gathered about the nature and extent of the annotations will be made available through original cataloging records created in OCLC during the course of the project.

The University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML) requests $265,643 to establish the Southeast Asian Digital Archives (SEADA) by processing and digitizing eight archival collections documenting the rich history of Southeast Asian (SEA) refugees in the greater Lowell, Massachusetts, region in the late 20th century. UML's Library and Center for Asian American Studies will collaborate with several community organizations to better understand the histories and cultures of Southeast Asian Americans by collecting, documenting, preserving, and making publicly accessible the vast public and personal materials that are currently in danger of being damaged, lost, or discarded.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art respectfully requests a three-year $350,000 NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Implementation Grant to support the creation of an online research portal to provide access to digitized archival materials created by or related to Marcel Duchamp. The Duchamp Research Portal will unify the Museum's voluminous digitized holdings with those of our two partner institutions—the Association Marcel Duchamp and the Musée national d'art moderne Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris)—making the bulk of Duchamp's archival materials, consisting of approximately 60,516 documents, accessible and discoverable through a single interface built on Linked Open Data. The Portal will constitute a learning resource of incalculable value, one we anticipate will generate substantial new contributions to scholarship on the life and work of one of the twentieth century's most significant artists.