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Program: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources*
Date range: 2012-2014
Sort order: Award year, descending
Program: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources*
Date range: 2012-2014
Sort order: Award year, descending
The digitization and incorporation into an electronic archive of images of more than 1,100 works of English broadside ballads from the 17th century, as well as illustrative woodcuts, facsimile transcriptions, contextual essays, and audio files of sung versions of the ballads.
The University of California-Santa Barbara requests critical funding to launch an important 5th stage of its digital English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) and include Harvard University's Houghton Library broadside ballads--1,137 works. Houghton has granted UCSB unprecedented permission to add its ballad holdings to EBBA. The expanded archive will provide high-quality digital facsimiles as well as "facsimile transcriptions," which preserve the ballads' original "look," with all their ornament, while transcribing the original font into easily readable roman type. In addition, we will offer deep cataloging according to TEI/XML/MARC standards, song recordings, informative essays, flexible search functions, and an improved technological infrastructure to both automate and enhance human cataloging of ballad "groupings" that are visually and textually similar. An expanded EBBA will open up new ways of understanding early modern popular culture, literature, art, music, and collectors.
The repatriation and restoration of 26 U.S. nonfiction films from the 1910s and 1920s, currently located at EYE Film Institute Netherlands.
The NFPF requests $300,000 to preserve and present 26 American nonfiction films of the 1910s and 1920s, the period from which the fewest films survive. A time capsule of industry, agriculture, explorations, natural wonders, and current events, the works were found at EYE Film Institute Netherlands, evaluated onsite, and selected for their research value by a team of American scholars and archivists. Three-quarters no longer exist in the U.S.; the remainder are represented by poorer copies. With NEH support, the nitrate prints will be preserved to 35mm film with reconstructed English-language intertitles, in collaboration with EYE, AMPAS, GEH, LOC, and the Oregon Historical Society, and digital copies will be made available on the web, with new essays and music. Building on our successful repatriation efforts with Australia and New Zealand, this NFPF-led collaboration will recover "lost" resources for the humanities and pave the way for further film preservation partnerships in Europe.
Enhancement of public access to a collection of 175 oral histories documenting the migration and settlement of Latinos in the southern United States, particularly North Carolina, from the 1980s to the present.
We seek funding to enhance public access to The New Roots Latino Oral Histories, a collection of oral histories based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that documents the recent migration and settlement of Latinos in the southern United States. The project will enable better management and enhanced access to the oral histories, particularly within Spanish-speaking communities throughout the Americas. We will create a bilingual digital archive and a visually engaging website to connect public audiences to audio recordings, oral history transcripts, and a catalogue in English and Spanish. We will create an online publishing platform that will draw content from a larger repository at UNC Libraries using open source Omeka software. Funding will also support processing and translation of the collection's oral histories into Spanish and English and the creation of materials that will enable public audiences to better use and understand the collection.
The preparation of entries for the "Dictionary of Old English," a historical dictionary based on the entire extant corpus of Old English texts written between 650 and 1150 C.E.
The aim of the Dictionary of Old English (DOE) is to define the vocabulary of records written in English between 600 and 1150 C.E., using the technology of the twenty-first century. Because of its Electronic Corpus, comprising at least one copy of every Old English text, the DOE is based on a comprehensive examination of the surviving evidence. The DOE complements the other major historical dictionaries of English: the Middle English Dictionary (1100-1500 C.E.), and the Oxford English Dictionary (which catalogues English up to the present). DOE: A to G online (2007), the first Web version of the first eight letters (out of 22), created links to the online OED; in 2010 OED created reciprocal links to DOE. The 2013 internal version of DOE online displays links to MED and now for the first time to thumbnail manuscript images represented by Parker on the Web, providing users with the visual evidence for DOE's interpretation of some textual difficulties.
Development of about 450 entries for the "Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia," an online reference resource that focuses on the history and culture of the region, which encompasses the City of Philadelphia and portions of the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.
The Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers University-Camden seeks funding for The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, a civic project to build knowledge and understanding about the region encompassing the City of Philadelphia and portions of the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. This multi-phase project is a collaborative, digital-first initiative to create, aggregate, and share information about a region and its history. With essential planning and demonstration projects completed and initial digital publishing underway, the project seeks support for a new phase of content development and temporary expansion of editorial staff for two years of accelerated digital publishing, resulting in a minimum of 450 new published essays within the grant period. The priority for content development will be to broaden and deepen the project's metropolitan scope with essays that define and illuminate "Greater Philadelphia" as a region.
The expansion of digital archives and a Web site that make available primary sources related to the social and cultural history of women during the Qajar dynasty (1785-1925) in Iran. This project would expand the resource's coverage of socio-economic classes, ethnicities, and geographic locales.
The WWQI project is a comprehensive digital archive and website that addresses a significant gap in the scholarship related to the Qajar dynasty in Iran by making available writings and other personal documents created by, and reflecting the lives of, women during the Qajar era. To date, the WWQI archive contains 33,000-plus digital facsimiles of primary source materials held by 43 private families and individuals and 10 major archival institutions. New funding will enable the WWQI project to not only increase the volume of its collections, but also to substantially expand the range of socio-economic classes, ethnicities, and geographic locations represented within the WWQI archive. The WWQI project draws upon the Harvard Libraries' robust and stable structure for cataloging, archiving, and maintenance-through-time of digital research collections, thus ensuring long-term access to all materials digitized under the auspices of NEH funding.
The cataloging and digitization of 2,850 South and Southeast Asian manuscripts dating from the 16th to the 20th centuries from the University of Pennsylvania's Rare Books and Manuscripts Library to enable free online access.
With the largest collection of Indic manuscripts in North America, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries propose to catalog and create digital facsimiles for all of its holdings. The images will be available to view, download, and harvest--free of charge, under a Creative Commons license--via the website, Penn in Hand: Selected Manuscripts. The project will provide more accurate metadata--which can be openly harvested and downloaded as XML files--than is contained in H. I. Poleman's 1938 publication, A Census of Indic Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, and will offer more access points--such as genres, uniform titles, subjects, and scribes--for researchers looking for relevant material. In addition, the names of authors and titles will be entered in their original scripts, making this Philadelphia-based collection a truly international resource. The outcome will afford global accessibility for Penn's unique materials, enhancing teaching and research worldwide.
Collaborative planning for creating access, through an online portal, to regional Native American writings held by small tribal archives across New England. Three pilot projects to test workflow for digitizing these materials would be undertaken and protocols and agreements for future collaborative work would be drafted.
The project will convene a group of regional Native American knowledge keepers, humanities scholars, and digitization and intellectual property experts for project and planning activities associated with the online portal, "Writing of Indigenous New England." At present our growing collaboration includes scholars, librarians, web developers and tribal historians from New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. We seek NEH funding to accomplish three initial goals: (1) convene a 2-day editorial board meeting and planning session, from which we will (2) write up our editorial guidelines and priorities, agree on culturally-sensitive intellectual property protocols, and establish technical specifications for the website; and (3) run three pilot projects at the Tomaquag Museum (RI), Indigenous Resource Collaborative (MA), and Passmaquoddy Heritage Center (ME), to help us establish workflow, clarify budget and staffing expectations, and begin drafting some larger funding proposals.
The conservation treatment, digitization, and preparation for crowdsourced transcription of 150 oversize scrapbooks documenting the Benjamin Keith and Edward Albee vaudeville theater circuit.
With this three-year project, the University of Iowa Libraries proposes to (1) provide conservation treatment for the 150 oversize scrapbooks in the Keith/Albee Vaudeville Theater Collection held by the UI Libraries Special Collections department, (2) create digital facsimiles of these scrapbooks for inclusion in the Iowa Digital Library, and (3) consequently, preserve and expand access to a highly used humanities research collection that is rapidly deteriorating as a result of brittle book syndrome and frequent handling.
Processing papers and digital files, reformatting audio and video recordings, creating finding aids for, and providing digital access to a collection documenting the work of eco-art movement artists Helen and Newton Harrison, encompassing 230 linear feet of mixed materials and 1.5 million digital files.
Researchers and practitioners alike have found it necessary to take account of the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries in their work as they articulate the complex problems of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Harrisons have played leading roles in both inciting this methodological change and demonstrating where this kind of work can lead. The collection contains a wide variety of formats of materials and is coupled with their ground breaking integration of both analog and born-digital materials. A processing and preservation project is therefore an efficient option informed by key intellectual intersections. The grant project will take 1.5 years to complete. At the end of the project, we will have processed 230 linear feet of mixed materials, reformatted all the audio and video elements, captured and processed born-digital material (0.5 terabytes or 1.5 million files).
The creation of an integrated database of archaeological data from excavations at the Egyptian site of Giza, distributed across ten institutions in the United States, Europe, and Egypt, representing some 170,000 digital files.
The Giza Project is an international initiative dedicated to the collection, electronic preservation, scholarship, and popular presentation of the world's most famous archaeological site: the Giza Pyramids. We are currently poised to present Giza's rich cultural legacy to the global community by undertaking the creation of the GizaCARD, a core database with the innovative goal of being the central repository and research hub for all Giza data from all collections worldwide and spanning all periods. GizaCARD will represent an unprecedented global collaborative effort and will in future feed a new public website that embeds traditional archaeological documentation into an immersive 3D computer model of the entire site of Giza. The Giza Project provides a model of archaeological and archival information management and demonstrates how digital archaeology may become a new public forum for inquiry and discovery for all.
Development of an online collaborative catalog for researching the historic and current locations of manuscript books produced before 1600.
The New Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts: A Research Tool for Tracking the Current & Historic Locations of Manuscripts is a three-year project to redevelop the current Schoenberg Database into an online, collaborative tool for researching the historic & current locations of the world's manuscripts produced before the age of print. This project will result in a simple, innovative solution to a historic problem & a global task. Starting with existing data from the current version, the new Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts will be an online, user-driven, collaborative tool for creating a "meta-catalogue" for indexing & finding the world's manuscripts. The New Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts will employ numerous strategies to build, maintain & encourage a vibrant & proactive user-community & will seek partnerships with other similar, online resources to strengthen the content of the database as well as our partners' content by allowing cross-searching capabilities across platforms.
The digitization of primary sources about the history of food in the United States from 1930 to 1942, including surviving materials created by the Works Progress Administration, 200 community cookbooks, and a selection of commercial food advertising and packaging. These written materials, photographs, and recipes will be made openly accessible through "What America Ate," a digital archive on American eating and foodways during the Great Depression.
Michigan State University (MSU), in cooperation with two other university libraries and three state archives, will create a digital archive on the history of American eating during the Great Depression. The What America Ate archive will feature a range of digitized culinary sources from 1930 to early 1942, including papers from the original Works Progress Administration America Eats project, housed at the U.S. Library of Congress, Montana State University Library, and the state archives of New York, North Dakota, and Kentucky, and 200 community cookbooks produced around the country during the Depression, held in the MSU Library's Special Collections and the University of Michigan Library's Janice Bluestein Longone's Culinary Archive. The digital archive will also include over 700 rare advertisements, food packaging materials, and commercial cookbooks produced by food companies in the 1930s from MSU's Alan and Shirley Brocker Sliker Culinary Ephemera Collection.
The completion of monolingual dictionaries for inclusion in the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia project for the following eight languages: Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Panjabi, Prakrit, Sindhi, Sinhala, and Telugu. In addition, access tools for these resources would be developed, including improved search and display capacities for the online interface, new analytical tools, complete content delivery and access for mobile devices, and the addition of audio pronunciation examples for two of the languages.
The University of Chicago proposes a two-year project to convert and disseminate monolingual and etymological dictionaries as electronic resources. This will extend the coverage of the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia (DDSA) and support humanities research and advanced language learning in Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Panjabi, Prakrit, Sindhi, Sinhala, and Telugu. Additionally, the dictionaries currently available from DDSA will be enhanced through improved facilities for searching and displaying data, content delivery to mobile devices, and other improvements. This project addresses the significant lack of authoritative on-line lexical resources for several major South Asian languages. The scholarly importance of these dictionaries ensures their wide usage by both academicians and the general public.
Planning and implementation of a pilot project to digitize archival sources at six California State University (CSU) system schools dealing with Japanese American internment during World War II.
A consortium of California State University archives requests support for a Foundations project to plan for the digitization of documents concerning the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. The goal of the proposal is to identify Japanese American collections and unite those collections digitally through a website.
A strategic planning effort for and initial development of the Academy Motion Picture Oral History Digital Archive, a repository that would include more than one thousand oral history interviews with screen and radio actors, directors, writers, composers, cinematographers, editors, and other production staff, which have been collected from 1947 to the present.
To support the development of a comprehensive strategic plan to create the Academy Motion Picture Oral History Digital Archive, the first industry-wide collection of motion picture-related oral and visual histories. With interviews recorded in 1947 through the present, the Archive will bring together the oral and visual history collections of a founding consortium of the Academy, Art Directors Guild, Film Music Foundation, International Cinematographers Guild, Motion Picture Editors Guild, Screen Actors Guild Foundation, Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), and Writers Guild Foundation.
Cataloging and digitization of 4,000 art posters dating from the 20th and 21st centuries that illuminate many aspects of Puerto Rico's social, political, and cultural life.
The proposed Digitizing the Puerto Rican Poster Collection of the Museum of History, Anthropology and Art at the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras Campus is a three-year project that will digitize 4,000 posters of the 20th and 21st centuries. Digitizing this collection will preserve the collection and enable the transfer of information about them from a manual record into a computerized collections management system, and will make the museum's unique holdings accessible globally.
The digitization and reunification of over 6,200 plant specimens and nearly 5,000 pages of documents collected or created by South Carolinian naturalist Henry William Ravenel (1814-1887). The resulting digital collection will allow full-text searching and browsing by subject heading for archival materials and provide a map to browse the locations where botanical specimens were collected.
Plants and Planter explores the life, business pursuits, and natural history interests of South Carolina planter, botanist, and agricultural writer Henry William Ravenel (1814-1887). Digitizing and reuniting over 6,200 botanical specimens collected by Ravenel with his voluminous and multifaceted journals and other primary source materials totaling almost 5,000 pages. Plants and Planter will digitize fragile archival and specimen materials; OCR text of archival materials to allow for full-text searching and geographic information visualization; establish a Web site accessible by the general public as well as researchers and students and powered by the Drupal 7 content management system which will unite the digitized materials and interpretive texts in an easy-to-use interface allowing for keyword and full-text searching, thematic browsing, and mapping of specimen locations. The Web site will allow for the research and teaching of 19th-century natural science and regional history.
Producing detailed plans for cataloging and digitization of the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum's collection on the history of Chicago.
The proposed project will complete detailed plans for preserving, digitizing, and cataloguing a portion of the incredible wealth of multi-media materials collected by the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum. This will be the first step in making the collection accessible to scholars as well as the general public via a searchable, interactive website. The Southeast Chicago Historical Museum emerged in the early 1980s as the regional steel industry was collapsing and became a central repository for area residents to collect and preserve artifacts relating to the industrial as well as social, cultural, and environmental history of this once vibrant region. The proposed work includes: 1) assessing the condition of the collection; 2)developing criteria for prioritizing content for preservation and digitization; 3)creating a metadata scheme that supports exploration and analysis;4)developing technical standards for preserving assets; and 5)structuring a preservation & digitization work plan.
Updating PhiloBiblon, a bio-bibliographical database of texts written in the vernacular Romance languages of medieval and early modern Iberia-Portuguese, Castilian, Catalan, and Galician. The project would enhance the project's software and would incorporate 7,000 15th-century Spanish lyrics.
The goal of this eighteen-month project is to take steps to provide for the sustainability of PhiloBiblon, which serves as a vehicle for four major bio-bibliographical databases on the Romance vernacular cultures (Castilian, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan) of medieval and early modern Iberia (containing a total of almost 315,000 records). Succession planning is under way for staff and host institutions, but we must also ensure that both the database application software and the web-hosting software will remain viable vehicles for the dissemination of materials critical for the study of medieval and early modern Iberia, and, more importantly, that the data themselves remain available for the foreseeable future.
Conservation and digitization, through 3D imaging, of 21 historic globes, dating from the 17th to the 19th century, that document the history of cartography and exploration; and the creation of an online resource with digital access to 30 globe manuals and 300 instructional texts from the same period.
We propose to create an open, online resource that will present historic globes (1603-1900) in innovative, interactive 3D animations together with a corpus of 330 works (1668-1900) about the use of globes in education. This resource will support the further cultural and material analysis of historic globes as well as their incorporation in to K-12 education in history, geography, and spatial and visual literacy. A precondition of the project is to stabilize and restore to legibility 21 rare and irreplaceable globes (1603-1856) that form the essential core of our unique collection; we request NEH support specifically for this necessary conservation work.
The cataloging and digitization of 100,000 prints and negatives from the archives of five Malian professional photographers who have been active from the 1940s to the present. These works document traditional cultural and religious practices, the history of dress, gender, and status, and colonialism and modernization in southern Mali.
The MSU Archive of Malian Photography will digitize, catalog, preserve, and render freely accessible to a worldwide audience 100,000 rare images from the original archives of five professional photographers in Mali. Created by prominent African practitioners whose work was commissioned by private patrons as well as State governments, these images document traditional cultural and religious practices, rural festivals, early colonial developments, and processes of modernization in Ségu, Mopti, and Bamako, as the latter transitioned from a small agrarian trading village into an urban center and national capital. Recording local practices from African perspectives, these visual materials contain important twentieth century representations of local aesthetics, methods of identity construction and preservation, and documentary strategies.
A Foundations-level project to plan and conduct pilot work for an online portal to archival sources pertaining to the history of women's higher education in the United States.
Bryn Mawr College, in collaboration with Barnard College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Vassar College, Wellesley College, and the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, seeks support for a Foundations project to develop a shared approach to cataloging and providing access to the letters, diaries, and scrapbooks from the first generations of women to attend college. The seven colleges, once known as the Seven Sisters and regarded as the equivalent of the Ivy League before those institutions admitted women, contain extensive holdings of student personal writings dating back to the late-nineteenth century, an unparalleled and only partially tapped resource for the study of a wide range of women's history issues over the last century and a half. The seven institutions propose to make their collections more widely accessible through the development of a common search portal and shared standards for metadata and thematic vocabulary.
The conservation and digitization of 6,000 manuscript fragments from the Library's Cairo Genizah collection.
The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary proposes to conserve, catalog, and re-house material from its Cairo Genizah collection and, in partnership with The Friedberg Genizah Project, digitize and provide online access to this material for scholars and the public. The Cairo Genizah is a valuable source of information about Jewish and non-Jewish religious, economic, social, and personal life in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean from the 9th to the 19th century. The Library's Genizah collection is comprised of 43,000 fragments--the second-largest in the world. This project will make approximately 6,000 of these fragments that are currently unreadable or too fragile to be handled and digitized widely available for research for the first time, and complete The Library's part in an ongoing international collaboration.
The arrangement and description, and partial digitization, of an art gallery archive containing 1,400 linear feet of records documenting the acquisition and sale of European and American art in the United States between 1848 and 1971.
This application seeks support to accelerate processing and partial digitization of the recently acquired M. Knoedler & Co. Archive (1848-1971). The Knoedler Archive is one of the most important collections on the formation and history of the American art market, and development of private collections that later formed the central collections of the first American art museums, including the National Gallery of Art, the Frick Collection, the Huntington Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The proposed project will arrange, preserve, and describe the files of the twelve series, and digitize client correspondence, index cards, and 42 volumes of stock and sales books. Once processed, the Knoedler Archive will be freely accessible to scholars, researchers, curators, artists, and the interested public for new research, education, and programming. This 30-month project is scheduled to begin July 1, 2014 and end December 31, 2016.
The second phase of development of the Sampler Archive, an online digital repository and searchable database of images and descriptive information about American girlhood samplers and pictorial embroideries from the 17th through the 19th centuries.
The purpose of the Sampler Archive Project is to create an online digital repository and searchable database that brings together digital images and detailed descriptive information on American girlhood samplers and pictorial embroideries from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. The Sampler Archive Project: Phase 2 will build on the work already completed in Phase 1 by: (a) increasing the number of museum objects in the online database from 300 to 2300; (b) increasing the types of contributors the project can work with by developing protocols for non-institutional partners; and (c) enhancing the Sampler Archive's website to increase functionality for scholars and other audiences.
Planning for the creation of a digitized corpus of Coptic texts of importance to scholarship in biblical studies, early Christian history, and linguistics. The project would develop a pilot text corpus and establish technical standards to ensure interoperability of the corpus with other digital projects on the ancient world.
Coptic, having evolved from the language of the hieroglyphs of the pharaonic era, represents the last phase of the Egyptian language and is pivotal for a wide range of disciplines, such as linguistics, biblical studies, the history of Christianity, Egyptology, and ancient history. The Coptic language has proven essential for the decipherment and continued study of Ancient Egyptian and is of major interest for Afro-Asiatic linguistics and Coptic linguistics in its own right. Coptic manuscripts are sources for biblical and extra-biblical texts and document ancient and Christian history. Coptic SCRIPTORIUM will advance knowledge in these fields by increasing access to now largely inaccessible texts of historical, religious, and linguistic significance. The project designs digital tools and methodologies and applies them to literary texts, creating a rich open-access corpus.
The cataloging and conservation of 6,000 manuscript collections documenting the history of New York City and the United States more generally, spanning the 17th to 20th centuries.
The New-York Historical Society respectfully requests funds to support the first two years of a four-year project to catalog and conserve the American Historical Manuscript Collection. This collection consists of 12,000 distinct, small collections, averaging about 40 pages each, and dating from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. The contents, a range of physical formats including account books, baptism records, bills, certificates, date books, deeds, diaries, indentures invoices, leases, letters, receipts, tax records and wills, comprise a powerful amalgam of multiple creators, subject areas, time periods, and geographic locations that offer unprecedented views into the history of New York and the United States. Funds will support the hire of two cataloguers and two cataloging assistants over a two-year period.
The digitization of 5,300 celestial maps and star charts, works on paper, scientific instruments, and prints from the 15th to 20th centuries, documenting humanity's visual depictions of the cosmos.
The Adler Planetarium seeks NEH support to digitize and make accessible all celestial cartography in the Adler collections. Dating from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, the Adler's celestial cartography focuses on European astronomy, but also includes significant examples from China and the Islamic world. The intellectual content of the Adler's celestial cartography reaches well beyond the history of astronomy. Researchers use the collection to study subjects related to the history of religion, navigation, technology, art, and printing. From antiquity to the present day, maps of the heavens are tools for understanding human life on Earth. As a result of the celestial cartography digitization project, fragile collections materials will be preserved and available for use in Adler programming. Digitizing celestial cartography and making it freely accessible will open new interdisciplinary research possibilities in art, history, and science.
The digitization, indexing, and online publication of 483 oral history interviews documenting the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi.
The Center for Oral History & Cultural Heritage at The University of Southern Mississippi seeks two years of funding in order to preserve and to make widely available to scholars and the public oral histories related to the history of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. Recorded on analog media, these media are currently available only to scholars who can access the collection in person and they are in danger of degradation due to age and media. We ask for funding to support the digitization of these oral histories, compilation of detailed recording logs, and cataloging through the University Libraries. Digital media will then be shared, with complete metadata, to scholars and the public by publishing not only in the Southern Mississippi card catalog, but also through the Mississippi Digital Library (http://www.msdiglib.org) and the Civil Rights Digital Archive.
A planning grant for the development of an online research portal for digitized archival materials created by or related to the artist Marcel Duchamp.
Home to the largest and most significant collection of Marcel Duchamp artwork in the world, as well as an unparalleled collection of Duchamp-related archival materials, the Philadelphia Museum of Art seeks a one-year planning grant to pursue the first online research portal for digitized archival and reference materials created by or related to the artist. This work will be undertaken in collaboration with the Association Marcel Duchamp and the Musée National d'Art Moderne and Bibliothèque Kandinsky at Paris's Centre Georges Pompidou. Planning activities include consultation with copyright and technical specialists; collections surveys; and a meeting of an Advisory Board, representing Duchamp scholars, arts institutions, and technology and humanities advisors to formalize plans for designing, creating, and maintaining the Research Portal. A comprehensive white paper will document all planning efforts and guide project implementation.
Assessment, processing, cataloging, digitization, and rehousing of the Museum of the City of New York's 7,200-item Ephemera Collections documenting a wide range of topics in the history of New York and the United States.
The Museum of the City of New York seeks a grant of $142,056 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a two-year project to improve stewardship of and increase public access to a major collection of printed and three-dimensional ephemera through archival assessment and processing, cataloging, digitization, and rehousing. This initiative will extend the useful life of these holdings for research, exhibition, and public programming. Containing over 7,200 objects of material culture, the Museum's Ephemera Collections include advertisements, handbills, pamphlets, menus, invitations, medals, pins, buttons, badges, three-dimensional souvenirs, and printed textiles, such as ribbons and sashes. These objects-the minor and transient documents and souvenirs of everyday life-provide visual and material insight into New Yorkers' engagement with the social, creative, civic, political, and physical dynamics of the city, from the Colonial era to the present day.
Multi-spectral imaging and digitization of a 15th-century world map, drawn by Henricus Martellus, a German cartographer who worked in Florence, and documenting knowledge of cartography and the world's geography at the time.
This proposal seeks NEH funding to create and make available to scholars and the interested public world-wide multi-spectral images of one of the most important and influential maps of the fifteenth century, which was made by Henricus Martellus and resides in the Beinecke Library at Yale. This large and unique map probably influenced the geographical ideas of Christopher Columbus, but fading and scuffing of the map have rendered most of the texts on the maps illegible. Multispectral images of the map should render many of those texts legible, and thus make deep scholarly study of the map possible. The images would be made permanently and freely available to the public for use via the internet on the Beinecke Digital Library in both Jpeg2000 and TIFF formats.
Cataloging and digitization of approximately 46,000 Roman Imperial coins in the society's collection, and creation of an online reference database describing Roman imperial coin types, with links to specimens in other major coin collections.
Implementation of Online Coins of the Roman Empire (IOCRE) is a project with four fundamental aims. 1. To publish fully online, for the first time, the major reference collection of Roman Imperial coinage of the American Numismatic Society. 2. To use the principles of Linked Open Data to aggregate data on existing specimens of Roman imperial coins from international collections so as to supplement data from the ANS's own collection to create a virtual catalog (OCRE) that for the first time makes the entirety of Roman Imperial coinage easily accessible to all audiences. 3. To ensure that OCRE leverages existing vocabularies, such as Dublin Core and the specialized numismatic vocabulary hosted at nomisma.org. 4. To implement and publish OCRE as an open access tool for the identification, cataloging and research of Roman coinage by a broad range of users, from museum professionals and archaeologists to students and researchers in related humanities disciplines.
Cataloging and digitization of 365,000 artifacts from Andrew Jackson's home, The Hermitage, located near Nashville, Tennessee, that document socio-cultural relations between the owners and the enslaved population from the late 18th century through emancipation.
From 1804 until 1845 The Hermitage was home to Andrew Jackson and scores of enslaved men, women, and children who labored in the fields of Jackson's cotton plantation near Nashville, Tennessee. To shed needed light on the daily lives of The Hermitage's enslaved community, archaeologists excavated hundreds of thousands of artifacts from twelve domestic sites of slavery. Despite extensive excavations, compelling insights, based on archaeological evidence, into the economic, social, and cultural dynamics of The Hermitage plantation community have remained elusive. This proposal requests funds to catalog, analyze, digitize and disseminate data on hundreds of thousands of artifacts and archaeological contexts from six excavation areas at the First Hermitage. These collections are currently virtually inaccessible to researchers and the public and making the data available will yield new insights into changing lifeways of enslaved people during the 19th century in the Upper South.
The cataloging and digitization of 230 American vernacular music manuscripts dating from 1730 to 1910.
This is a collaborative project between the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University and the American Antiquarian Society to digitize, catalog, and provide web-based public access to their American vernacular music manuscripts collections, dated ca. 1730-1910. We will: take conservation measures where necessary; digitize all materials to archival standards; develop a bibliographic description of each manuscript; catalog the materials in MARC format record structure that includes content (song-level) inventories; build the "American Vernacular Music Manuscripts" website, which will direct users to appropriate page images stored on Internet Archive; develop a system for long-term/redundant storage of all digital files; launch the resulting website onto the Internet; and advertise its public access. We will also establish vernacular music manuscript cataloging guidelines and create a cataloging manual that other repositories may employ.
Conservation treatment of up to 11 sculptures in the collection of the Des Moines Art Center. Works are by artists Scott Burton, Alexander Calder, John Chamberlain, Carl Milles, Henry Moore, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenberg, George Segal, David Smith, Robert Smithson, and Frank Stella.
The Sculpture Conservation Project involves the conservation of 11 sculptural artworks of varying ages, sizes, mediums, and artistic genres. Proactive measures have been taken to develop the best strategies for a Long Range Preservation Plan for the organization, of which this project is a KEY component. Treatment of these works involves the preservation of artwork that contributes to the cultural record - works that in many cases are considered the most important in an artist's oeuvre. The works are part of a long, rich history, one that defines not only the time and place of its creation, but also the history of the our permanent collections. The sculptures are viewed, researched, and appreciated by hundreds of thousands of individuals each year. Without the necessary conservation of the sculptures the public, worldwide, is at risk for losing access to each work. Without proper treatment the sculptures will progress beyond repair.
Cataloging of up to 1,700 Sanskrit manuscripts in the Houghton Library at Harvard University for future digitization and integration into a digital library of Sanskrit. Ultimately, about 75,000 manuscript pages would be made searchable together with Sanskrit-English lexica and other linguistic tools developed for analysis of machine-readable texts.
The proposed project aims to enhance access to primary cultural heritage materials of India housed in American libraries by integrating them with digital texts, lexical resources, and linguistic software in a digital library of Sanskrit, one of the world's richest culture-bearing languages. Integrating primary cultural materials with the Sanskrit Library will enable broad use of Indic collections for research and education. The project catalogs all the Sanskrit manuscripts in the Houghton Library at Harvard University as the first phase of a larger project to catalogue, digitize and integrate them with corresponding digital texts in the Sanskrit Library. The result serves as a model for collections of Indic materials throughout the U.S. and the world, and for digitization projects of cultural materials in other major culture-bearing languages such as Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese.
The transcription and textual encoding of nearly 2,000 early English works (1473-1700) for an open access collection on travel-related literature. The collection would also become part of the larger text-encoded collection produced by the Text Creation Partnership in collaboration with Early English Books Online.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) is a commercial product that provides digital facsimiles of more than 125,000 early English books. The Text Creation Partnership (TCP) is a non-profit, library-based effort to produce the corresponding electronic text. The great virtue of EEBO is that it provides a single point of access to rare books housed in libraries around the world. The contribution of the TCP is to transcribe these books into accurate electronic text, that is, to produce a fully searchable digital version of every unique English-language work represented in EEBO, leveraging the EEBO pageimage resource into an invaluable text corpus of around 70,000 works.
The second phase of digitization of and creation of access to the papers of architect and designer Marcel Breuer (1902-1981), focusing on the second half of his career, and enhanced functionality of the current online resource.
The Marcel Breuer Digital Archive, 1953-1981, will digitally unite source materials from the second half of Breuer's career, during which Breuer's services were sought by powerful business, governmental and religious institutions. These source materials (70,000 items in total) will join those relating to Breuer's early life, which have already been digitized as part of an NEH-funded grant received by Syracuse University Library's Special Collections Research Center in 2009 and made accessible through the website, http://breuer.syr.edu. Syracuse University will enhance the functionality of the existing site through the creation of a "lightbox" feature that will allow users to save images that they intend to use for further research or for teaching purposes. A digital humanities pilot project, Mapping Marcel Breuer, will create a geospatial mapping tool that will help users visualize Breuer's professional networks and the locations of his buildings.
A planning and pilot project to establish protocols and practices for digitization and preservation of 100,000 photographs, 2,000 films and videos, and 500 linear feet of print materials documenting industrial design education.
From washing machines to computers, and sports cars to space capsules, America's infatuation with invention has fueled industrial design. Design history helps us understand American culture in a whole new way. By engaging an interdisciplinary team of diverse experts, Art Center College of Design proposes to advance historical knowledge of American culture through an archival preservation and access management pilot project. As the country's leading school of industrial design, Art Center archives include photos, films, and print material documenting American innovation over an 80-year period. New policies and procedures will be tested for digitization and public access, while immediately preserving assets at greatest risk for deterioration. The pilot project will build Art Center Archives' organizational capacity to ensure that the history of American innovation and imagination can be told for years to come.
The cataloging and digitization of 3,098 items in an audiovisual collection that documents the performance history of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), among the oldest and largest professional regional repertory theater companies in the United States. The materials will be cataloged and digitized along with a six-volume, 900-page descriptive finding aid for the audio collection.
Digitization of 3,098 deteriorating films, audiotapes and videos that comprise a comprehensive record of Shakespeare and theatrical performance by a single U.S. theater company. The digitized recordings and a descriptive finding aid will be freely accessible on-line. The collection documents the eight-decade history of one of the oldest and largest repertory theaters in the country and holds essential insights into the origin of the Shakespearean festival tradition in the United States and its impact in individual American communities and on a national level.
The digitization of ten manuscript collections, comprising 132 linear feet, pertaining to the history of the coal and oil industries in the Eastern Kentucky Appalachian region.
The University of Kentucky Libraries seeks funding to digitize and make available 132 cubic feet, an expected 264,000 pages, of a nationally significant body of historical evidence. The selected portions of the Bert T. Combs Appalachian Collection focus on 189 years of critical economic development in the Eastern Kentucky coalfields from 1788 to 1976. The ten individual collections document the search for, extraction, and distribution of coal, oil, and natural gas resources in Appalachia. The records follow the creation of the railroads that brought these raw materials to industrial manufacturers and electrical power generators across the United States. The ten selected collections provide evidence of the company towns, their services, and the individual lives that grew up to sustain and make possible this economic development and struggle.
Creation of a digital collection related to the development of Atlanta during the 20th century. It would be comprised of 1,550 georeferenced city planning maps, 235 city planning publications, 300 photographs, 12 new oral histories, and a demographic dataset for 1955 to 2000.
Georgia State University Library proposes to create a new digital collection, Planning Atlanta: A New City in the Making, 1930s - 1990s, which will consist of 1550 digitized and georeferenced city planning maps, 235 digitized city planning publications, 300 digitized photographs, 12 new oral histories, and a digitized dataset of annual Atlanta demographic data from 1955 to 2000.
A 12-month planning project that will engage multiple partnering institutions -- including the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Brigham Young University, Brown University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the Newberry Library, and others -- to conduct an initial analysis of pamphlet collections published during the French Revolution era (1780-1810). The systematic identification and organization of corresponding data sources, item descriptions and online collection content would improve the overall discoverability of all pamphlet collections and contribute to the preliminary planning of a French Pamphlet Digital Portal.
The George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida request $39,246 to support assessment, and planning activities that will leverage expertise from a mix of professional domains. In partnership with the Libraries, the following French Pamphlet Planning Project partners agree to work together towards collaborative data collection, analysis and the establishment of standards, workflows and project goals: the Center for Research Libraries, institutional members of the Collaborative Initiative for French Language Collections, University of Michigan, Brigham Young University, Stanford, Yale, Johns Hopkins University, University of Alabama, University of Kansas, the Newberry and the National Library of France. Partners agree the proposed 12-month (May 2013 – April 2014) planning project will yield important collection access outcomes.
Processing of 551,000 photographs and creation of a digital archive of 19,820 selected images from collections of three prominent photojournalists in the African American Photography Collection.
This project will create a digital archive of 19,820 images from the African American Photography Collection of the Institute for Arts & Media at California State University, Northridge, between May 1, 2013 and April 30, 2016. The collection documents the social, cultural, and political aspects of African American life in post-war Los Angeles and Southern California and in doing so illuminates nationally significant themes such as racial segregation and discrimination, the civil rights movement, African American entertainment and cultural leaders, and major political and cultural events. The project will focus on the work of prominent photojournalists Harry Adams, Charles Williams, and Guy Crowder, whose collections together total 551,000 images. The digital archive will expand access to and use of these images, furthering NEH efforts to bridge cultures within our society.
Production of the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, in print and digital form.
The project constitutes the middle phase of the production of The Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, to be published in online and print formats in 2017. The print volume will be organized as a traditional, one-volume, A-Z encyclopedia to be published by Northern Illinois University Press. The digital version, to be hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, will include the contents of the print volume, along with two other components powered by the digital format, which we call the "Underbook" and the "Overbook." The NEH project period consists of two distinct but interrelated activities: 1) developing the intellectual content of the encyclopedia, approximately 320 original entries and other content, thereby aggregating and synthesizing existing knowledge about Milwaukee and its region; and 2) creating a digital platform to acquire, preserve, and disseminate that intellectual content, in digital and print text, audio, and video form.
The continuation and expansion of "Archipedia," an online state-by-state resource on architectural history, by commissioning writing teams to document representative buildings from states not yet added to this resource, preparing essays on landscape and settlement/urban settings, and incorporating materials from existing and new print volumes of "Buildings of the United States."
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) seeks funding to complete SAH Archipedia, an online encyclopedia of American architecture, which was created with a $262,881 start up grant from NEH Preservation and Access in 2010. On October 1, 2012 SAH will launch the online encyclopedia in two versions: (1) SAH Archipedia, a subscription resource containing 11,000 illustrated and mapped building histories from 12 print books in the award-winning Buildings of the United States (BUS) series; and (2) SAH Archipedia Classic Buildings, an open-access encyclopedia featuring 100 of the most representative buildings from those 12 states. SAH wants to complete SAH Archipedia and requests funding to hire 37 teams of architectural historians to write histories of the 100 most significant buildings, landscapes and historic settlements/urban settings in each of the states not yet included in SAH Archipedia. In addition, SAH requests funding to add legacy material from 8 print BUS volumes.
Digitization and enhanced access to sign lists compiled by Mesopotamian scribes and scholars, which document the cuneiform writing system. Editions with translations of about 1,500 texts dating from 2,500 BC to AD 100 would be made freely accessible online with links to images of the cuneiform tablets, indexes, bibliographic data, and glossaries.
"Reading the Signs" will provide comprehensive digital access to an important corpus of ancient cuneiform sign lists (dating between 2,500 BCE and 100 CE), yielding essential evidence for the correct reading of cuneiform signs and for the understanding of intellectual culture and its development in Ancient Mesopotamia. Sign lists are clay tablets (often school texts) which document for each sign that was in use in the cuneiform writing system the proper reading (pronunciation) as well as the meaning of the words that could be represented by that sign. Editions with translations of this corpus of about 1,500 texts will be made freely accessible under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license 3.0 through the NEH-funded Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts, itself a partner in the open-source open-access ORACC (Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus) consortium. The editions will be provided with links to images of the cuneiform tablets, indexes, bibliographical data and glossaries.
The digitization of 30,000 scientific manuscripts and letters produced and received by Charles Darwin for access via the Darwin Manuscripts Project and Darwin Correspondence Project websites as well as the Cambridge Digital Library.
Foundations of Darwin's Science will fund a digital manuscript collection comprising 30,000 of the most important Darwin scientific manuscripts extant. The project will create high-resolution digital images of these manuscripts that will then be disseminated by the Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History.
Continued development of the multi-volume reference work "The History of Cartography" with particular attention to Volume Four on the "European Enlightenment, 1650-1800," Volume Five on "The Nineteenth Century," and Volume Six on the "Twentieth Century."
The award-winning History of Cartography is the only comprehensive and reliable reference work that studies the people, cultures, and societies that have produced and consumed maps from prehistoric times to the present. It provides intellectual access to the complex world of maps for scholars, teachers, students, librarians, and the informed general public. It thus promotes and sustains the culturally sophisticated interpretation of maps as evidentiary source materials. Thoroughly researched by its editors and international contributors, its content is rigorously checked by an experienced editorial team. In addition to publishing in print, as befits a definitive source of information, the University of Chicago Press is producing an online edition to maximize access.
A planning project to establish protocols and agreements for creating digital access to 3,000 cartographic images, held by multiple institutions, that document the Revolutionary War era (1750-1800).
The Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library is developing a Central Cartographic Web Portal, focusing on the American Revolutionary War Era. This curated database will provide broad access to primary source documents that will include a judicious selection of the best and most informative printed and manuscript maps from approximately ten collections in the U.S. and Europe. The materials will focus on military mapping; 18th century American maritime charts; and urban mapping. The theme of the American Revolutionary War Era will serve as a pilot and model for additional themes in future years. Two advisory teams, one composed of curators and humanities experts, the other of technical expertise for cataloging and data management, will advise and create protocols for all aspects of the project. The site will improve access to vastly expanded resources through technology; advancing the scholarly, educational and cultural enrichment missions of all participating institutions.
Planning for the creation of access to the museum's curatorial files, representing approximately 262 linear feet of correspondence, photograph albums of exhibit installations, an object index catalog, and bibliographic references for an encyclopedic collection of 35,000 works of art that were collected from the mid-19th century through the present and range from ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance works to decorative arts and modern European painting.
The Walters Art Museum requests $40,000 to arrange and describe content of the curatorial files, compile records stored across disparate locations, assess records for value to the humanities, prioritize materials for digitization, and create an online finding aid to inform the public of the information available. The content of these curatorial records pertains to the artworks in the Walters' world-renowned collection and reveals the origins, experiences, and journeys of the treasures in our collection.
Cataloging and digitization of 7,750 works of Northwest regional art, including textiles, baskets, masks, photography, paintings, prints, and drawings.
The Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon requests a grant in the amount of $171,765 over two years from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support Phase II of the Museum's Northwest Art Initiative (NWAI). The NWAI seeks to further establish Northwest art as a recognized art historical tradition by digitizing and sharing the Museum's vast collection of works created by artists working in the American Northwest. In Phase II, the Museum will digitally capture and disseminate more than 7,750 works from its permanent collection, offering national and international exposure for Northwest artists and allowing their works to be studied in an art historical context. The NWAI builds on the Museum's ongoing commitment to sustainability and access. The complete, 3-year project (Phases I & II) will successfully digitize and share nearly 30% of the Museum's permanent collection online while increasing its discoverability through enhanced metadata and inclusion in federated resources.
The arrangement, description, and selected digitization of the papers of jurist and educator J. Clay Smith, Jr., pertaining to 20th-century civil rights history and African Americans in the legal profession.
J. Clay Smith has had a distinguished career as a military judge, a commissioner for the EEOC, a professor and dean at the Howard University School of Law, and as the preeminent historian of African Americans in the field of law. He has donated more than 200 cubic feet of papers--documenting both his career and his extensive historical research--to the University. The purpose of the grant is to speed the processing of these papers and make them available to the general public for research. Should the grant be awarded to the University, the funds will go to paying the salary of project archivist, archives technicians, and a internet consultant, who will be hired to solely process the papers using current archival practices, and scan a significant portion of the papers to make them available to researchers via the internet.
Cataloging and digitizing ca. 2,000 administrative documents dating around 500 B.C. from Persepolis, the chief imperial residence of the Achaemenid kings in the homeland of the ancient Persian Empire.
Since 2006, the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project has conducted an emergency program to record tens of thousands of clay tablets and fragments with texts in several languages and with the impressions of thousands of seals, a unique archive from the heart of the Achaemenid Persian empire at its zenith, about 500 BC. Access to these tablets in danger because of a lawsuit against the government of Iran; the digital images, catalogs, text editions, and drawings that the Project compiles and distributes online will preserve the archive's contents for scholars and the public in perpetuity.
Development of an electronic Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic lexicon, based on a print dictionary published in 1907. The project would update entries, incorporating the past century's textual discovery and scholarship.
The project we propose under this grant involves the updating, expanding and making accessible of one of the primary English language resources for the study of the Hebrew Bible and its world. This project, the electronic Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon, is based on the most widely-used and reliable dictionary for the study of Biblical Hebrew, the Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament of Francis Brown, S.R. Driver, and C.A. Briggs, which is now over one hundred years old. A century of discoveries and new analyses is missing from this essential reference, and yet nothing of comparable utility or reliability has appeared to replace it or fill in these gaps. Our project to update this dictionary and make it accessible as a freely-available online resource, with a print-on-demand option that is in wide use here at UT, is ready to move ahead, and with support from NEH, can become a reality in just a few years.
The first production phase for the online Colorado Encyclopedia, providing authoritative information on the state's history and culture.
The Colorado Encyclopedia is designed for students, researchers, educators and others as an online, interactive, one-stop source of dependable, professionally informed entries and essays about Colorado. Written to connect humanities scholars to primary sources digitized by Colorado's various cultural heritage institutions and using easy and accessible, state-of-the-art technology for optimum public engagement, the Encyclopedia employs interactive features for content and comments, and educational features aligned with multi-tiered and grade-specific Colorado Academic Standards. Colorado Humanities, Colorado State University and University Press of Colorado will combine efforts to produce the authoritative resource. The Encyclopedia board of directors and staff will work with the Colorado State University Extension Program and many other educational institutions to develop content. A dozen advisory boards will also contribute editorial, educational, technical and community expertise.
The digital preservation of 24,000 Mexican and Mexican-American recordings of traditional and vernacular music from the Discos Ideal label, dated from 1940 to 1990, issued on 2,400 33-1/3 rpm LP vinyl records and 200 reel-to-reel master tapes; partnering with the Digital Library at the University of California, Los Angeles, the recordings would be mounted on a searchable, bilingual website.
The Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Records is the world's largest gathering of Mexican vernacular music, constituting the most sweeping sound-recorded document of greater Mexican culture. To date, the Arhoolie Foundation, owner of the collection, has successfully completed the digital preservation of some 17,000 78-rpm records (34,000 individual recordings) and 20,000 45-rpm discs (40,000 individual recordings)and 9000 individual recordings on rare cassettes; in partnership with the UCLA Digital Library, we have created scholarly and public access through a searchable bilingual website. This proposal seeks to continue our work and support the transfer of an additional 24,000 recordings carried on approximately 2,400 33-1/3 rpm LPs and 200 one-of-a-kind reel-to-reel master tapes from the Discos Ideal label, and delivery to the University of California Digital Library where they will be made available online to scholars and to the general public.
A collaborative effort to digitize approximately 25,000 pages of historical documents relating to free people of color in Louisiana and the lower Mississippi Valley, including family papers, business records, and public documents.
People of African descent who lived in colonial and antebellum America and were born free or escaped the bonds of slavery made significant contributions to the economies and cultures of the communities in which they lived. Their anomalous status made them one of the most talked about "problems" of the first half of the nineteenth century, yet their story has been largely overshadowed by the more inhumane story of slavery. We propose to digitize and, via the LOUISiana Digital Library, provide free public access to a minimum of 25,000 digital scans drawn from family papers, business records, and public documents pertaining to free people of color in Louisiana and the lower Mississippi Valley. The project will bring together collections held by the Louisiana State Museum, Louisiana State University Libraries, the New Orleans Public Library, The Historic New Orleans Collection, and Tulane University's Louisiana Research Center.
Collaborative planning to improve access to two complementary collections of historical documents and artifacts at several cultural institutions relating to 19th-century American icon P.T. Barnum (1810-1891).
The Barnum Museum Foundation, Inc. requests a grant of $40,000 that will enable The Barnum Museum and Bridgeport Public Library to work with a team of consultants to create a comprehensive plan for digitization and global access to important humanities collections. The year-long project is designed to result in the ???road map??? critical to implementing a well-managed digitization project that can fully realize its objectives for preservation and access. The project will improve intellectual control of the two institutions??? related P. T. Barnum collections, and incorporate a range of activities that utilize the knowledge, experience and expertise of the team members. The project will lead to a plan for broad access to these significant humanities resources and create digital content that would be placed in an aggregate digital resource repository with a curated platform.
The second phase of a project to create a digital archaeological atlas of Old World archaeological sites with an emphasis on central and eastern China, southeastern Europe, central Asia, the Indus Valley, and the African Sahel, based on 3,000 CORONA satellite images, augmenting images of the Near East that were the focus of the first phase of the project.
This project seeks funding to expand an online database of declassified, Cold War-era CORONA satellite imagery, collected as part of the world's first intelligence satellite imaging program from 1960-1972. These unique images, made publicly available in 1996, have proven to be a critical resource in archaeology, primarily because they preserve a picture of sites and landscapes that predates recent agricultural, industrial and urban development. Such land use changes have often resulted in archaeological features being obscured or destroyed, and CORONA is therefore a truly unique resource, enabling archaeologists to reconstruct and virtually explore lost landscapes. Research in the Near East, where CORONA has been most extensively utilized, shows its potential as a tool for the discovery and mapping of archaeological sites, the documentation of associated roads, canals and field systems, and the reconstruction of ancient landscapes.
Digitizing approximately 14,000 newsreels from the Fox Movietone News Collection from 1919 to 1934, and making these recordings freely available on the Web.
This grant to University of South Carolina (USC) Libraries Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC) will fund Phase One of the two-part Fox Movietone Digitization Project. Phase One is a two-year project that aims to vastly increase access to the Fox Movietone News Collection, by making approximately 15,000 of the estimated 23,000 total titles in the collection available as streaming videos on the free web with robust descriptive metadata. It also aims to test the preservation functions of the MIRC-DVR, via ingest of high resolution digital surrogates for 1,000 titles in the Fox Movietone Collection.
The digitization and transcription of 3,500 manuscript pages written by David Livingstone, pertaining to his exploration of Africa, for inclusion in the Livingstone Online Web site, along with the development of tools and services to enhance use by scholars and educators.
The Livingstone Online Enrichment and Access Project (LEAP) will support updating, integrating, and providing access to Livingstone Online (http://www.livingstoneonline.ucl.ac.uk/) and its digital image and transcription collections in order to secure the site's long-term sustainability as a unified, open-access resource for scholars and the general public. . Our site -- a well established, transatlantic, digital archive initiative -- seeks to provide worldwide access to the writings of Dr. David Livingstone (1813-73), the Scottish abolitionist, missionary, and explorer of Africa.
A Foundations project to plan the cataloging and digitization of a collection of ca. 12,000 maps and ancillary materials on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The Metadata Construction and Digitizing Maps of Afghanistan and Pakistan project will enable collation, digitization, cataloguing, library indexing, analysis, storage, and eventual selective publication of all relevant and unique mapped and written materials on Afghanistan and Pakistan to make them available to the public worldwide and to preserve them for posterity. The original maps and digital surrogates will be housed and maintained in the Arthur Paul Collection in the University of Nebraska at Omaha Criss Library and financially sustained by the Center for Afghanistan Studies after the grant period is over. The long-term benefits to research, education, and public programming in the humanities provided by this project is a valuable and one-of-a-kind source of unique data on a country that hosted America's longest war.
The digitization and indexing of 100 books containing approximately 8,000 emblems from the early modern period (1531-1750) along with the metadata enrichment of 244 additional emblem books, all of which would be combined in the online portal Emblematica Online.
The early modern emblem (1531-1750), a bimedial genre and a vehicle of cultural expression in the Renaissance, conveyed complex ideas in a compact and compelling format. The study of emblems informs multiple academic disciplines. Early modern printed emblem books are geographically widely spread. This proposal will create an Emblematica Online virtual collection to provide Renaissance scholars with integrated, multi-granular access to a large representative corpus of digital surrogates for emblem resources that are otherwise only available at geographically dispersed locations. The virtual collection will expand the digitized emblem literary corpus, index it, and make it available through a single point of access. It will also enrich their cataloging and indexing. To achieve digital archiving and preservation, additional workflows for capturing content and metadata will be developed and community agreements will be extended to encompass the interoperability.
Enhanced cataloging for a collection of 20,000 photographs that span the history of American and European photography from the 19th to the 21st century, rehousing and conservation of approximately 3,300 of them, and creation of access to highlights of the collection through a series of online exhibits and catalogs.
The Art Institute of Chicago is seeking three years of funding at the level of $350,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities-Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program, to support a comprehensive transformation in presenting the museum's sixty-year-old Photography collection to the public-one that will fundamentally reconceive uses of this vast and stellar collection by online visitors, students and educators, and museum-goers. The basis for this far-reaching reorientation in audience engagement will be an overhaul in web publishing, storage, and conservation for the more than 20,000 photographic objects acquired since the 1940s.
Development of a Web-based survey instrument and methodology to conduct new fieldwork on American regional English. The survey would include large parts of the original questionnaire used for compiling the "Dictionary of American Regional English" (DARE) plus questions designed to reflect changes since the 1960s. The results of a pilot survey for Wisconsin would be used to adjust the methodology before undertaking nationwide fieldwork.
Publication of Volume V of DARE was a huge milestone, but not the end of the work, for American English has changed greatly in the last 50 years. DARE proposes to initiate new fieldwork, from July 2013 to June 2015, to track those changes. Using Wisconsin as a pilot, the project will develop a web-based survey to gather the data. Based on the results, adjustments will be made to the methodology before a nationwide survey is attempted. The research will include large parts of the original Questionnaire plus questions designed to reflect societal changes since the 1960s. The original 22 DARE communities and 18 new ones, representing the current state population, will be surveyed. The web based survey will be designed by the UW Survey Center. It will also include a telephone interview with free conversation, the reading of a story, and a word list designed to elicit pronunciation variants. DARE will analyze the data and make changes to the methodology before initiating a nationwide study.
Funding details
Original grant (2013) $300,000
Supplement (2013) $30,000
A Foundations project to develop a plan to process and digitize ca. 262 linear feet of documents, photographs, books, and journals chronicling American missionary activity in the Ottoman Empire from 1824 to 1950.
The American Research Institute Turkey (ARIT) respectfully requests $40,000 in outright funds from the NEH to support project planning for management and dissemination of the resources of the American Board of Missions (ABM) archive and library in Istanbul. ARIT proposes to develop a comprehensive and efficient plan for the preservation, arrangement, cataloging, and digitizing of the archive of the American Board of Missions in Istanbul.
The arrangement, re-housing, and completion of cataloging of 323,000 still images in multiple formats in the museum's Humanities Image Archive (HIA), containing a wide range of ethnographic and archaeological materials dating since 1871, and the digitization and mounting on the Internet of 5,000 high-demand images.
The Denver Museum of Nature & Science seeks support for a three-year project to garner intellectual and physical control of its Humanities Image Archive (HIA) prior to its installation in the state-of-the-art Education and Collections Facility addition in 2014-2015. The HIA contains 770,000 rare and irreplaceable images in 2,900 linear feet of improper storage. A total of 323,000 images (42% of the HIA) require processing prior to their installation in the ECF. These to-be-processed images include a wide variety of formats ranging from black and white and color negatives to color transparencies, prints, hand-painted lantern slides, glass plate negatives, photogravure and silver gelatin prints, stereo cards, and moving images. The HIA also includes 1,894 audio-visual tapes and more than 100 three-dimensional art pieces. This project will provide sustainable preservation environments for the HIA for generations, ensuring its continued accessibility to researchers and the public.
Digitizing and creating free online access and English-language finding aids for 70,000 judicial and notarial records of the New Orleans French Superior Council (1714-1769) and Spanish Cabildo (1769-1803) that document the history and culture of the city's inhabitants during the colonial era.
With this request, and on behalf of the Louisiana State Museum (LSM), the Louisiana Museum Foundation seeks $336,750 to enable the Museum to digitize and e-publish the French Superior Council (1714-1769) and Spanish Judicial records (1769-1803), which are the oldest non-sacramental records in the Lower Mississippi Valley, for free access by anyone with a web-enabled device. Designed to address access and preservation issues, the project will digitize and e-publish high-resolution scans of the records, extant paper-based finding aids and synoptic translations on LSM's and other websites, and will create a searchable database of the records. Education and outreach programming will publicize the project and promote use of the records by researchers, genealogists, educators and the general public.
The preservation and provision of intellectual access to three collections documenting the history of country music in America: 1) Bob Pinson Recorded Sound Collection, 2) Moving Image Collection: Bobby Bare and Friends, and 3) Photo Collection: Fabry Still Image Collection.
The Country Music Foundation (CMF) requests a grant of $347,132 over a two-year period. The purpose of the project is to preserve and increase access to three rare and endangered collections integral to the history of country music in America. This project is a critical step in a major digitization initiative to preserve museum collections and access them through a digital asset management system. Once transferred, the original source materials from this project will be stored according to best practices for conservation in climate-controlled vaults currently under construction. Three collections have been selected by as the first and most urgent collections for digitization based on their rarity, fragility, number of access requests, and historical importance: Bob Pinson Recorded Sound Collection--Rare and unique acetate and vinyl transcriptions discs; Moving Image Collection--Bobby Bare and Friends; and Photo Collection--Fabry Image Collection.
Preparation of the "Encyclopædia Iranica," a multi-disciplinary reference work and research tool on Iranian history and civilization from prehistory to the present. The project would add up to 600 new entries to the online database, update earlier entries, and improve user interaction through social media.
Encyclopaedia Iranica is a major interdisciplinary research tool in the humanities for scholars and students in Middle Eastern, Central Asian, Afghanistan, and the Indian subcontinent. Non-specialists too would find the material interesting and lucidly written. It is a vehicle for the publication of original research or synthesis of current scholarship. All of the articles are written with careful documentation and extensive bibliography by leading scholars from many different countries. This NEH application for the two-year period of July 2013 through June 2015 concerns only the EIr's digital edition. The project seeks funding to accomplish two interrelated goals during the grant period: (1) add 400-600 new entries to the online database to fill in its coverage in the letters K-Z; (2) build visitor traffic to EIr through timely communication and improved interaction with the help of social media. .
The digitization and incorporation into an electronic archive of images of up to 1,754 English broadside ballads from the 17th century, as well as illustrative woodcuts, facsimile transcriptions, contextual essays, and audio files of sung versions of the ballads.
The University of California-Santa Barbara requests critical funding to launch an important fourth stage of its electronic English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) and mount online the seventeenth-century ballads, primarily the Crawford collection, held by the National Library of Scotland--approx. 1,754 works. The NLS has granted UCSB unprecedented permission to add its ballad holdings to EBBA. The expanded archive will provide high-quality digital facsimiles as well as "facsimile transcriptions," which preserve the ballads' original "look," with all their ornament, while transcribing the original font into easily readable roman type. In addition, we will offer deep cataloguing, TEI/XML and MARC records, song recordings, informative essays, and an enhanced search engine. An expanded EBBA will open up new ways of understanding early modern popular culture, literature, art, and music as well as the history of ballad collecting.
The preparation of entries for the "Dictionary of Old English," a historical dictionary based on the entire extant corpus of Old English texts written between A.D. 600 and 1150.
The aim of the Dictionary of Old English (DOE) is to define the vocabulary of records written in English between 600 and 1150 C.E., using the technology of the twenty-first century. Because of its Electronic Corpus, comprising at least one copy of every Old English text, the DOE is based on a comprehensive examination of the surviving evidence. The DOE complements the other major historical dictionaries of English: the Middle English Dictionary (1100-1500 C.E.), and the Oxford English Dictionary (which catalogues English up to the present). In December 2007, the project released DOE: A to G online, the first Web version of the first eight letters (out of 22), and in April 2008, we published a Windows-based version, DOE: A to G on CD-ROM. A transformative feature of the electronic DOE is the link to the online OED, providing a mechanism for dictionary cross-searching. In December 2010, with file numbers supplied by DOE, OED online created a reciprocal link back to DOE online.
The digitization of 10,000 engraved and woodcut illustrations from British and English-language books published in other parts of the world between 1604 and 1700.
British Book Illustration: Extending Access to 17th-Century Visual Culture (BBI) will afford humanities researchers access to the largely hidden collection of narratively- and iconographically-rich woodcut and engraved illustrations held in the Folger Shakespeare Library's early printed books. This project will digitize and index 10,000 English book illustrations in two phases: First, BBI will cover illustrations for the years 1604-1640, starting after the Tudor period where current reference guides end. Second, BBI will enable access to a large portion of the world's extant major 17th-century illustrated works with 3,300 illustrations from the Folger collection of 1641-1700 English imprints. The illustrations will be available publicly through the Folger's Luna Insight image database and indexed by subjects, names of depicted individuals and places, and names of producers.
Online and print publication of the official inscriptions of Sennacherib and Sargon II, rulers of ancient Assyria, which are preserved on clay tablets and other artifacts. The project would also provide transliterations, translations, and bibliographic information.
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP): Preserving and Providing Access to the Official Inscriptions of the Kings of Assyria from Tiglath-pileser III to Esarhaddon (744 to 669 BCE)
Incorporating five early 20th-century American periodicals, "McClure's Magazine," "The Smart Set," "The Masses," "Camera Work," and "The Seven Arts" into a digital archive of modernist journals.
The early 20th century was the golden age of magazines and for a decade the Modernist Journals Project has worked to collect and aggregate them into one of the leading digital resources for the study of modernism. We seek funding to add a cluster of rare yet deeply influential American magazines to our collection: "McClure's Magazine" (1901-1910), which pioneered the genre of investigative journalism; the "Smart Set" (1913-1922) when it was brilliantly edited by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan; "The Masses," a wildly experimental magazine that linked political and aesthetic revolt; Alfred Stieglitz's "Camera Work," which helped establish photography as a fine art; and "Seven Arts," a short-lived but vibrant little magazine. The MJP provides searchable texts, page images, TEI-compliant transcripts, and full metadata records, all served freely through a website that surrounds these archival objects with scholarly and historical materials that facilitate their use.
The digitization of 233 audio and moving image recordings pertaining to the history and culture of California in the 20th century, held by archives and libraries throughout the state.
The California Audiovisual Preservation Project (CAVPP) proposes to digitize, preserve and make available to the public 233 historically important, unpublished, and seriously endangered analog audio and moving image recordings (over 200 hours or 300,000 feet) contributed by 19 California partner archives and libraries. The "California Light and Sound" collection will support research, teaching, and learning across an array of humanities disciplines. The CAVPP provides statewide leadership to facilitate access and accomplish preservation work most individual archives are unable to undertake. Based on best practices and standards, the CAVPP guides institutions through the process, from nomination of titles to selection to description to digitization, and brings to light hidden media collections via the Internet Archive (IA) and the California Digital Library's Online Archive of California (OAC), online repositories that are available for the purposes of non-profit, educational use.
The digitization of approximately 200 historical medical journals, held by five major libraries, for free online access via the Medical Heritage Library (MHL) collection on the Internet Archive (IA) as well as through the HathiTrust digital repository.
This project provides for the selection and digitization of up to 200 historical American medical journal titles dating from 1797 to 1923 (approximately 7,350 volumes or 2,152,000 pages) both to preserve them and to make them freely available publicly via the Medical Heritage Library(MHL) collection on the Internet Archive website. These titles, which will be selected with the advice of scholars in a range of disciplines, will be complemented by 30,000 digitized medical rare books from 1750 to 1923, already contained in the MHL. The medical journal titles to be digitized will be drawn from the collections of the collaborating libraries, with any missing volumes supplied by the National Library of Medicine and other MHL collaborators. The availability of the digitized collection will be widely publicized via the MHL website, social media, and network of advising scholars.
Enhanced cataloging, digitization, and creation of online access to 112 Flemish manuscripts (45,000 pages of text and over 3,000 pages of illumination) from northeastern France and Belgium from the 13th to the 16th centuries.
"Imaging the Hours," a three year project to preserve and make available cataloged digital surrogates of 112 manuscripts from the Walters Art Museum's world-famous collection. Approximately 45,000 pages of ancient text and over 3,000 pages of superb medieval illuminated images from Northeastern France and Belgium will be digitally captured and documented.
The digitization of 100,000 pages of material from MSU's Vietnam Advisory Group records and related holdings, dating from 1955 to 1962, and the development of enhanced access features for full-text searching, semantic searching, and mapping.
Michigan State University (MSU) will make the records of a significant international program accessible online using innovative digital tools to encourage new scholarship and collaborative research in the fields of American Foreign Relations, International Cold War Studies, Vietnamese Studies, and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies. The records of the MSU Vietnam Advisory Group (MSUG) detail the U.S. Department of State's technical assistance program for the Republic of Vietnam administered by MSU from 1955 to 1962. MSU's University Archives and Historical Collections, Department of History, and MATRIX digital humanities center will collaborate to digitize, describe, and make accessible approximately 100,000 pages of material from the MSUG and the personal papers of several faculty who participated in it via a dedicated project website. The project also will make these materials available through the Virtual Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University.
The development of a comprehensive digital archive and Web site that will preserve and render accessible primary sources related to the social and cultural history of women during the Qajar dynasty (1785-1925) in Iran. The sources include unpublished poetry, essays, travelogues, private letters, photographs, portrait paintings, calligraphies, marriage contracts, and legal documents.
Harvard University seeks renewed funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue its development of the Women's World in Qajar Iran project, a comprehensive digital archive and website that preserves, links and renders accessible primary source materials related to the social and cultural history of women' worlds during the reign of the Qajar dynasty, 1796 to 1925 in Iran. The dynasty is perhaps most notable for a series of intense interactions with Europe, many of which introduced cultural and political changes that still resonate in the Iran of today. The WWQI project addresses a significant gap in the scholarship related to this important time in the history of Iran by making available writings and other personal documents created by, and reflecting the lives of, women during the Qajar era. Since the project began in 2009 approximately 20,000 digital facsimiles have been created.
The preservation, arrangement and description, digital reformatting, and selective web streaming of 448 films, created by the Mountaineers Club, that document the natural environment of the Pacific Northwest.
The University of Washington Libraries' Special Collections will preserve and provide access to 448 motion picture films from the Mountaineers Film Collection.
The development of software tools to identify and describe natural history illustrations in digitized books and journals in the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
The Art of Life project seeks to liberate natural history illustrations from the 90,000 digitized books and journals (34 million pages) in the online Biodiversity Heritage Library through development of software tools for automated identification and description of visual resources. Missouri Botanical Garden and Indianapolis Museum of Art will build a new research environment for humanities scholars through development of new software tools for algorithmic assessment (data mining) and new interfaces for community enhancement of digital resources (crowdsourcing). The project will deliver: New software components for the identification and description of visual resources that can be reused by any digital repository; Preservation management techniques for visual resources contained within a digital library of scanned literature; and Enhanced access to millions of natural history illustrations, many never before made available for advanced inquiry and inspection.
The arrangement and description, re-housing, and partial digitization of up to 900 linear feet of the Harald Szeemann Papers, which comprise 3,000 artist files, over 200 project files, and 750 videos documenting the history of 20th-century art and visual culture.
This application seeks support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to process the two largest and most significant series in the recently acquired Harald Szeemann Papers (circa 1880-2005). The Szeemann archive is one of the principal privately assembled collections related to 20th-century art and visual culture in the world, and his series of project files and artist files are the heart of the archive. The proposed project will arrange, preserve, describe, and partially digitize the project files and artist files, and make them freely accessible to scholars, researchers, curators, artists, and the interested public. Together these two series comprise 900 linear feet of extensive correspondence, notes, unique drawings, rare posters, video artworks, artists' books, limited-edition items by noted visual, literary, and performance artists, and extensive documentation of Szeemann's exhibitions and other projects, both realized and unrealized.
Digitization of 34 avant-garde arts journals produced in Europe and North America between 1848 and 1923 that document the emergence of modernity through the literature, art, and music of the period.
As part of its newly inaugurated Blue Mountain Project, the Princeton University Library proposes to create digital editions of 34 avant-garde arts journals produced in Europe and North America between 1848 and 1923, when public domain ends in the United States. Ranging in character from illustrated newsprint to lavishly designed productions, these journals open a critical window on the past while illuminating our understanding of the arts today. Because full runs in good condition are difficult to find and access, Blue Mountain aims to build a thematic research collection of historic avant-garde magazines of arts and letters for use by scholars and students around the world. The Blue Mountain will comprise a trusted digital repository of high-quality page scans, text-encoded transcriptions, and extensive descriptions, which will be made freely available over the World Wide Web.
The digitization and presentation online of the contents of up to 5,000 volumes of annual reports and periodicals (ca. 400,000 pages in total) documenting Christian missionary activity around the world from 1850 to 1950.
The Yale Divinity Library, a division of the Yale University Library, proposes to digitize and make publicly accessible up to 5,000 volumes of annual reports and periodicals from the Day Missions Collection, the preeminent North American collection for documentation of the history of the missionary enterprise and the development of Christianity throughout the world. The prospective audiences are many, from scholars of mission history to social historians both of the U.S. and the rest of the world, from institutional stakeholders in the religious communities themselves to a broad range of general readers with an interest in the history of their country, their churches, and their families. A successful project will offer scholars, educators, students, and general readers useful and integrated access to rare and fragile materials, while eliminating the potentially damaging use of the originals and benefiting a wide community interested in world Christianity and its interactions and effects.
The arrangement and description of 120 linear feet of archival materials related to the institutional history of the Perkins School for the Blind from the 1830s to 1906.
The Archives at Perkins School for the Blind is a bountiful source of historical material that documents both the evolution of the field of blindness education and of the gradual inclusion of people with visual impairments into the mainstream of American life. Perkins is requesting funding for the arrangement and description of the nineteenth-century documents (1830s-1906) in its Archives, occupying approximately 120 linear feet. At the end of the project, Perkins will have created physical and intellectual control over the most frequently used and information-rich materials in the Research Library Archives, including correspondence, journals, and institutional records. These materials include correspondence and other items written by Helen Keller, Samuel Ward Howe, Charles Dickens, and Horace Mann. With a skilled and experienced Archivist working through the three-year grant period, we plan to follow archival best practices to make this important collection widely accessible.
Digitization of an estimated 21,000 pages of antislavery and antisegregation petitions sent to the Massachusetts state legislature during the 18th and 19th centuries.
America's past, present and future are filled with petitions. A host of archived petitions have been signed by tens of millions of Americans over time, ranging from colonial grievances (18th century) to slavery opposition (19th century) to temperance advocacy (20th century). Yet these vast resources are accessible only with great cost and difficulty, and risk physical erosion in the future. The Center for American Political Studies at Harvard, along with associated faculty and library staff, and in collaboration with the Massachusetts State Archives, will conduct a three-year project to (1) catalog and digitize antislavery and antisegregation petitions sent to the state legislature, (2) join these with previously-collected petitions to the U.S. Congress in a database, and (3) create an open-access web site where petition images and data can be used by teachers, scholars, and the wider public. Future projects will add new petitions to the database established by this project.
A consortium of 18 cultural organizations that would create an interactive online collection of 11,000 primary resources (including maps, drawings, photographs, documents, and digitized objects) related to colonial St. Augustine, Florida, in preparation for the 450th anniversary of its founding.
The University of Florida proposes to build an interactive online collection of key resources related to colonial St. Augustine, Florida. Along with the UF Libraries, Unearthing St. Augustine partners are the two City of St. Augustine departments (Heritage Tourism and Archaeology Program), historic Government House in St. Augustine managed by UF, and St. Augustine Historical Society. Since the 1970s, research in St. Augustine has elicited attention from scholars in history, archaeology, and historic preservation throughout Florida and the US. Efforts to protect and promote its historical importance have been ongoing since early in the 20th century. UF and its partners will establish for the first time a computer digitization lab at Government House which will be used create and disseminate an interactive digital collection of 11,000 maps, drawings, photos and documents available freely online; and, spatially enhance maps and images through geo-referencing.
The addition of approximately 300 entries to the online "Encyclopedia Virginia," covering topics and biographies related to Virginia's African American history from 1862 to 1902.
"Encyclopedia Virginia," a project of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, in partnership with the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, a project of the Library of Virginia, seeks support from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create more than 300 entries and a comparable number of transcribed primary sources for the encyclopedia's newest section, Freedom to Disfranchisement: The African American Experience in Virginia, 1861 to 1902, which traces the story of African Americans in Virginia from the ending of slavery and the beginnings of freedom and citizenship to the legislated 1902 reversal of those civil rights.
Preserving and making accessible online up to 3,019 hours of sound recordings and 4,500 related photographs dating from the 1920s to 1980s, drawn from the university's Southern Folklife Collection, that document the traditional music and musicians of the southeastern United States.
The Southern Folklife Collection (SFC) of the Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill plans to preserve and make accessible unique photographs and sound recordings documenting Southern traditional music. For this project, we will create preservation master files and reference copies from materials currently at risk or unavailable for public research. The digitized content will be made available to researchers via CONTENTdm and Variations, an online streaming system developed by Indiana University. Based on prior experience, we expect to preserve and make accessible up to 3,019 hours of audio recordings and 4,500 photographs over the project period.
Creation of finding guides to Walt Whitman's prose manuscripts held at more than 70 repositories together with images of the documents. The project would also develop an integrated guide that relates each manuscript to the work to which it contributed.
The Walt Whitman Archive (whitmanarchive.org) seeks a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create item-level finding guides to Walt Whitman's prose manuscripts, which are held at more than seventy individual repositories. The finding guides will be written in Encoded Archival Description (EAD) format, and we will associate with each description high-quality digital images of the manuscript material. These individual guides, linked to digital images, will then be dynamically joined in an integrated guide, using a system of identification that relates each prose manuscript to the conceptual "work" to which it contributed. When joined with the Archive's similarly implemented, award-winning guides to Whitman's poetry manuscripts, the EAD records created for Whitman's prose manuscripts in this project will provide unprecedented documentation of and access to the literary manuscripts of a major literary figure.
The digitization, creation of metadata, rehousing, and cold storage of 35,000 cellulose acetate photographic negatives and 60,000 linear feet of motion picture film that document the world's vistas, landscapes, streetscapes, flora, fauna, and humans as they appeared, worked, lived, and modified their environments; 31,000 images would be mounted on the Internet.
The American Geographical Society Library (AGSL), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, seeks funding to support phase II of its film preservation project first begun in May 2010 as NEH PW-50572-10. The current funding is enabling the AGSL to re-house, digitize, create metadata, publish on-line and preserve in cold storage its extensive collection of cellulose-nitrate negatives. Phase II would support the same process for the AGSL's equally extensive and valuable safety film collection of approximately 35,000 images, and digitize and make available approximately 60,000 feet of unique and important motion picture films in 16mm and 35 mm formats.
Continued editorial work to compile up to 25,000 searchable annotated bibliographic records documenting music and musical life in 20th-century Europe and in North and Latin America to be made available online and in printed volumes.
An "urgent need" for the retrospective indexing of music periodicals was recognized in the 1930s; RIPM was established in 1981 to undertake this task. Initially focusing on 19th-century music journals, RIPM, in 2003, expanded its scope to 1950 taking the first significant step toward filling the widely-acknowledged "access gap" in music periodical literature published between 1900 and the beginning of the modern indexing projects (1949). In 2005 RIPM announced its "Americas Initiative" aimed at treating North and Latin American music journals. Four years later the RIPM Online Archive (full-text) was released. Since 1988, RIPM has produced 272 volumes, an online database of 660,000 annotated records treating 175 music periodicals, and an Online Archive containing 100 rare music journals. This grant would permit RIPM to continue its work on 20th-century European journals and on those published in the Americas, and to produce 12 volumes and the equivalent data in electronic formats.
The re-housing, indexing, and creation of a database for 51,500 New York City District Attorney felony case files (572 cubic feet) dating from 1916 to 1925.
The Municipal Archives requests Endowment support for a project to preserve and index approximately 51,500 New York District Attorney case files dating from July 1916 through 1925. The case file documents are currently housed in highly acidic envelope "jackets" that are extremely brittle and crumble when handled. Access to the information in the files is further hindered by the lack of a searchable index. The case files are a significant resource for a range of scholarly works on the history of the nation's largest city during a critical time period. The NYDA case file jackets will be photocopied; the case file documents will be re-housed in appropriate archival materials and stored in a climate-controlled environment. Project staff will also produce a name-and-offense-based database index to the series. Project activities will take place in-house over an eighteen-month time period between July 1, 2012, and December 31, 2013.
Cataloging and creating digital images of archaeological artifacts and associated excavation records from the early Maya site of Cerros in Belize leading to a searchable database, accessible through the Internet.
The Florida Museum recently received a substantial collection from Cerros, an important Maya site in Belize excavated in the the 1970s in a project led by David Freidel. Cerros, best known from its Late Preclassic settlement (350 BCE-CE 150), has a significant Terminal Classic occupations (CE 850-1150) and a smaller Late Postclassic component (CE 1300-1550). The government of Belize transferred this collection permanently to the Florida Museum in exchange for proper curation and broad access for research. The collection came to the museum with field catalogues, a variety of whole pots and reconstructed ceramics, ceramic sherd type collections and entire units of excavated ceramic sherds, and a range of other archaeological materials. The Cerros Research Online Catalogue will allow broad access to field catalogues and dissertations, ceramic type collections, whole and reconstructed vessels and "small finds" that include deposits of lithics, jade, metalwork, and worked shell and bone.
Enhancement of an online archive of the writings of Charles Brockden Brown, an early American novelist, historian, and editor. This would entail: integrating bibliographies into a searchable interface, combining 972 text transcriptions with 8,083 images of the original works, and sharing metadata with an aggregator tool for 19th-century digital resources.
The Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition at the University of Central Florida's Center for Humanities and Digital Research is requesting funding in order to complete (1) integration of TEI-encoded primary and secondary source bibliographical materials into a searchable interface; (2) implementation of 8,083 JPEG images of documents into 972 corresponding TEI-encoded texts; and (3) integration of archive metadata data with NINES, a digital aggregator tool, to support interoperable search and discovery. This work will for the first time make all of Brown's writings, including his novels, freely available at a single location to scholars, teachers, students, and the general public. It will also allow for comparative research of Brown's writings alongside early nineteenth-century American and European publications, thereby enriching our understanding of how thought and language circulated and informed authorship and literary production during this time.
Cataloging and digitization leading to posting on the Web of up to 25,000 photographs taken by Christian missionary organizations in Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world during the first half of the 20th century.
The International Mission Photography Archive (IMPA) is a searchable, online repository of historical photographs from the collections of a large number of international missionary organizations. Because these groups have been active in various parts of the world for well over a century and a half, their collections represent a significant resource for the humanities and social sciences, with particular promise for the kinds of comparative inquiries that contribute to the understanding of cultural diversity. The IMPA "collection of collections" is freely available to scholars, students, and the general public. The proposed NEH funding will sustain the continuing effort to expand the size, the geographic scope, and the cultural and denominational diversity of the images. It will also support the design and conduct of a practical workshop on visual methods in religious history, aimed at an international group of scholars and archivists who have access to photo collections.
The arrangement and description of five archival collections, totaling 554 linear feet, documenting Mexican American civic participation and daily life in Los Angeles during the late 20th century.
The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) in collaboration with the UCLA Special Collections, the UCLA Digital Library, and the UCLA Center for Oral History Research seeks support for a project to arrange, describe, digitize and provide access to five collections that provide invaluable materials related to the histories of the post-World War II generation of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles.
Development of an online portal to reference resources on Syriac studies, including an encyclopedia, a prosopography tool for information related to Syriac sources, a classified bibliography, and other research tools. The portal would integrate and link information about the ancient sources and scholarly works.
Syriac is a middle eastern language once spoken by populations stretching across the Middle East and central Asia. For much of the first millennium C.E., Syriac served as a common language bridging the cultures of the Mediterranean and the Near East and serving as the cultural meeting point between Christianity and Islam. Today, perhaps more than ten thousand manuscripts written in Syriac survive, with a wide range of origin stretching from Turkey and Egypt to Iraq, Iran, western China and South India. These materials are of interest to scholars in a variety of humanities fields: Middle Eastern studies, classics, medieval history, religious studies, and linguistics. Unfortunately, due to the lack of reference works, Syriac documents are little studied today. The Syriac Reference Portal provides a new path into this area of history for scholars and the interested public through the creation of an online encyclopedia, a manuscript catalogue and other scholarly tools.
The digitization of the concert programs of the Boston Symphony Orchestra covering its full performance history (16,000 concerts) from 1888 to 2011.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra proposes to digitize and make freely accessible via the internet the full performance history of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This project will include scanning 235 bound volumes of BSO concert programs (more than 16,000 concerts and 7,500 individual program books) from the years 1888 to 2011. The resulting PDF files will be fully searchable and available both on the Internet Archive site at www.archive.org and on the BSO's website. In order to enhance this offering, the BSO will also link these files to an existing performance history database that will allow researchers to conduct sophisticated queries directing them to the original source material. Queries regarding performance history, and any associated programs and notes, represent one of the BSO Archives's most common areas of research inquiry.
The cataloging and rehousing of the archives of Howard Thurman (1900-81) and his wife Sue Bailey Thurman (1903-96), who were theologians and civil rights leaders, and the reformatting of audio recordings of Thurman's lectures, sermons, and speeches, to be made freely available on the Internet.
The Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University seeks a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support at two year project to electronically catalogue and digitize the archival collections of one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary theologians, philosophers, and civil rights figures, Dr. Howard Thurman (1900-1981), and his wife, Sue Bailey Thurman (1903-1996). The intermediate goals of the project are to arrange and describe the material utilizing current archival preservation techniques, ultimately providing an electronic finding aid for each collection. The scope of the project would allow us to digitize the 675 reel-to-reel and 354 cassette audio recordings of Dr. Thurman's lectures, classes, sermons and speeches. Our ultimate goals are to publish the finding aids for both collections online and to make the digital audio recordings available on a website hosted by the Gotlieb Center, accessible to the public at no cost.
The cataloging and digitization of 15,500 photographs from the archives of eight 20th-century American photographers, with enhanced catalog records for an additional 6,700 images already digitized and online access.
The Amon Carter Museum of American Art respectfully requests grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support Access to the Artist Archives, a two year project to digitize, catalog, and publish online the rare archival collections of eight prominent American photographers of the twentieth century Carlotta Corpron (1901-1988), Nell Dorr (1893-1988), Laura Gilpin (1891-1979), Eliot Porter (1901-1990),Helen Post (1907-1979), Clara Sipprell (1885-1975), Erwin E. Smith (1886-1947), and Karl Struss (1886-1981). These collections are comprised of 22,000 photographic prints and 200,000 negatives, manuscripts, other ephemera, books, and related collections. Together, the work of these eight artists represent an incredible diversity of American life in the twentieth century.
The cataloging and digitization of archival, library, and artifact collections documenting Native American history and culture in the Western Plateau region for inclusion in Washington State University's People's Plateau Portal, a reference resource linking cultural resources and regional indigenous cultures by allowing for the interpretation of these materials by native communities.
We are seeking an NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant to expand the existing Plateau Peoples' Web Portal by digitizing significant archive, museum and library collections related to the history of the Plateau peoples and region. Using the innovative interface and collections management system already in place in the portal we will expand the archival record and range of expert knowledge associated with the collections by facilitating the inclusion of Native and Humanities scholars' knowledge alongside standard archival metadata. In this third phase of an on-going collaborative project we propose to build on the existing open-access web-resource, technological platforms and tribal, academic and museum partnerships to produce a rich, extensive, sustainable and fully interoperable web portal linking Plateau nations, scholars and collecting institutions in a mutually beneficial relationship.
Digitization of architectural and landscape plans, photographs, correspondence, project files, and material samples for the National Historic Landmark Miller House and Garden in Columbus, Indiana. The collection of 23,000 items documents the collaboration of the Miller family and architect Eero Saarinen, landscape architect Dan Kiley, and interior designer Alexander Girard in the design, construction, and maintenance of this mid-century modern residence.
The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) seeks funding of $253,574.78 to digitize, catalog, and make accessible online primary source materials about the historic Miller House and Garden located in Columbus, Indiana. Designed by Eero Saarinen with interior design by Alexander Girard and landscape design by Daniel Kiley, the Miller House and Garden was the former home of J. Irwin and Xenia Miller. The property and many of its original furnishings were acquired by the IMA in 2009. The Miller House and Garden Collection, part of the IMA Archives, documents the design, construction, and maintenance of the property and includes materials in a variety of formats, such as: architectural drawings and blueprints, correspondence, textile samples, sketches, photographs, etc. The collection will be captured digitally and described with detailed metadata according to national standards. Once the materials have been digitized, the collection will be made available through the IMA Web site.
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