Funded Projects Query Form
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Four, two-day digitization workshops to collect local history materials from the Hispanic, German, Finnish, and Jewish communities of Butte, Montana.  The city has invested in the Butte-Silver Bow (BSB) Public Archives, since the public voted in favor of a $7.5 million bond issue to improve, expand, and modernize its archives in 2007.  The archives hosts a series of “All Nations” exhibits to honor the ethnic communities that have shaped the city’s history since its founding as a mining camp in the 1860s.  In partnership with the Montana Preservation Alliance, the workshops would combine digitization of cultural heritage materials with oral history collection and public programming, to include presentations by a local author and faculty from the University of Montana, Rocky Mountain College, and Montana State University.  The “All Nations” digital collection would be made available for research on the BSB Public Archives website.

All Nations: Preserving the Ethnic Heritage of Butte, Montana is a project to preserve and celebrate the heritage of ethnic communities that are important within the culture of the city's rich history. This grant will support staff of the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives and the Montana Preservation Alliance to conduct outreach with the last four communities to join the project -- the Hispanic, German, Finnish and Jewish communities of the city. The Archives and MPA will lead a digitization workshop with each community to capture and preserve significant elements of their material culture. Work with all communities will result in digitized files of documents, artifacts, artwork, recordings and historic places materials that will be added to the widely accessible collections of Butte Silver Bow Public Archives, and serve as the basis for a 10-week exhibit on each community that draws people of the community together, and celebrates and promotes broader understandings of their heritage.

Two “History Matters” events aimed at recovering, preserving, and making public the contributions of St. Mark’s, a historically African American community in Sewanee, Tennessee, changed and dispersed by racial integration.  In addition to digitizing photographs, family Bibles, oral histories, and other items from this under-represented community, proposed events would include presentations by experts in African American history and the Community Driven Archives Team at the University of North Carolina’s Southern Historical Collection.  Collected images and voice recordings would be made available to the public in an online exhibit managed by Sewanee’s Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation.

The University of the South will work with an African American community radically transformed during the racial integration of the 1960s, when loss of public institutions and lack of opportunity led to a diaspora. We will host community events inviting remaining residents and former residents to bring evidence of personal history (Bibles, photos and other objects) to be scanned and photographed using the “post-custodial model” of data collection. We will have oral history stations and will engage in community mapping to locate abandoned home sites using LiDAR images. Programming includes presentations on similar projects organized by the Community-Driven Archives Team of the University of North Carolina Southern Historical Collection and a “Places Project” conducted by a Mellon post-doctoral fellow. Central to the project is an online exhibit created to restore memory of the community and raising public acknowledgement of African Americans’ work to build it and the University.

One digitization event and two public programs focused on the history of California’s Iranian American community, the largest population of Iranians living outside of Iran.  The project would be managed by the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University (SFSU) in collaboration with SFSU Library and community organizations, such as the Diaspora Arts Connection and the Persian Center.  SFSU is home to a number of resources and complementary collections, including the College of Ethnic Studies, the Bay Area Television Archive, and the Sutro Library of the California State Library, which contains thousands of family histories from earlier California immigrants.  With donor permission, the digitized cultural heritage materials from this event would be made available through an Omeka-based exhibit on the Center’s website.  Public programs would feature presentations on the importance of family histories in public archives by Mattie Taormina, Director of the Sutro Library, and another by the Center’s director, Dr. Persis Karim, for the Iranian American community.

“We are Here: Building a Digital Archive for the San Francisco Bay Area Iranian-American Community” fills a gap in the history of California and Bay Area immigration history by documenting the untold stories of Iranian Americans who have for decades been overshadowed by negative news headlines that have obscured their human stories. Community members will scan original materials, help create metadata, and be interviewed about their stories at a digitization event at San Francisco State University in May 2019; this material will become part of a public history archive that preserves and share documents, photographs, letters, etc., on the website of the San Francisco State University Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies. Programs leading up to the “digitization day” include a presentation about family narratives as part of California history and another that highlights oral histories and digital storytelling for academic research and public history.

One digitization event and two public exhibits and programs focused on the history of Northwest Ohio’s Muslim community.  The proposed project represents a partnership between the Center for Archival Collections (CAC), which is a unit of the Bowling Green State University (BSGU) Libraries, and the Islamic Center for Greater Toledo (ICGT), which was founded in 1954 and represents the first community to build a mosque in Ohio and the third in the nation.  BGSU archivists and students would assist with digitization, and ICGT volunteers would assist with translating information about the historical items brought in by community members, which are likely to include personal documents and family artifacts in Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish, Urdu, Hindi, and Bengali.  With donor permission, materials would be featured in an Omeka-based digital exhibit and made available for research in the Digital Public Library of America through CAC’s participation in the Ohio Digital Network.

The Center for Archival Collections (CAC) and the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo (ICGT) will host a community scanning day and two public exhibits and programs focusing on the history of Northwest Ohio’s Muslim community, as well as the role of the ICGT within that history. Members of the ICGT and general public will be invited to bring any historical materials related to the project theme for reformatting and preservation by the CAC. The scanning day will present a significant opportunity for initiating the preservation of the region’s Islamic heritage, which has been anchored by the ICGT and the religious, educational and cultural programs offered to both its members as well as the greater Toledo community. Subsequent public programs and exhibits will allow the community at large - Muslim and non-Muslim - to learn about and engage with Islamic traditions and culture, and to better appreciate the significant role that Muslims and the ICGT have played in the history of the region.

From the early 1920s through the 1970s, residents of Delmarva (Delaware and the Eastern Shore counties of Maryland and Virginia) enjoyed attending games played by town teams that competed in the semi-professional Eastern Shore baseball leagues. Reflecting the broader segregation in American society, white players competed in the Eastern Shore and Central Shore leagues and African American players competed in the Negro League. Towns and communities on the peninsula built stadiums, sponsored teams, and paid players to compete in seasons that ran from spring through the late summer. Baseball on Delmarva was an integral part of cultural and social life in the region during this time. The Nabb Research Center for Delmarva History and Culture at Salisbury University will host a series of events in 2019 and 2020 to promote awareness of this rich history and to archive digital images of documents, photographs, and memorabilia connected to Delmarva baseball.

A two-day digitization event to collect materials regarding the under-documented contributions and stories of African Americans at Clemson University and from the surrounding community.  In collaboration with local community partners, the applicant would add digitized items to an existing Call My Name community digitization project created in 2014.  The proposed events would incorporate a community stage featuring music, dance, oral history collection, and presentations.  With donor permission, digital objects would be made publicly available on the web site and the South Carolina Digital Archive.

Through Call my Name, a community outreach project I created in 2014, I have collaborated with three local community partners—the Bertha Lee Strickland Cultural Museum in Seneca, SC, the Clemson Area African American Museum, and the Pendleton Foundation for Black History and Culture—to find, document, and preserve the African-American cultural heritage of Clemson University, which was built by convicts on the former Fort Hill Plantation of proslavery American statesman John C. Calhoun in Upstate South Carolina in the early 1890s, and the towns that developed around the higher education institution. I apply for a Common Heritage grant to support the digitization of African American material history that is collected during a two-day Black History Month event in February 2020 for use on the Call My Name website and the Documenting the Clemson African American Experience collection in the South Carolina Digital Archive, and to offer preservation support to the owners of the material.

A day-long digitization event to document the personal and family histories of the  Chinese American community, focusing on records and ephemera from family and professional associations, churches, and Chinese schools.  Preservation workshops for the public would be featured at the digitization event, as well as periodically throughout the year on such topics as photograph preservation, textile and object preservation, and training in how to record and save family stories.  Museum staff would also host a subsequent open house with tours of the archives and a “Letters Alive!” program, which would feature readings (in Mandarin and English) of historical letters from the archives written to Chinese American immigrants by their loved ones in China.  With donor permission, digitized materials would be made available for research at the museum’s archives and on the website.  The project would build upon an earlier Common Heritage award by expanding the museum’s outreach efforts in New York City, home to the largest Chinese population of any city outside of Asia.

The Museum of Chinese in America seeks a $12,000 grant from NEH to support Our Family Treasures. This program series aims to preserve, digitize and showcase Chinese-American family and community history and culture. The series consists of: one day-long Our Family Treasures preservation & digital archiving program; four to five how-to workshops led by professional archivists on preserving heritage materials; and monthly one-on-one digitization and consultation sessions with the Museum’s Collections staff. Working on the premise that American history and experience is shaped by the material culture and memories of those who interact intimately with them over time, Our Family Treasures spotlights the untold stories and living histories of immigrant communities in New York City and their heirlooms—objects, photos, paper documents, business and association paraphernalia, and other ephemera of familial and cultural importance—a goal that has been central to MOCA's mission since our founding.

Two community collection days to digitize materials and collect oral histories related to the Mississippi State Insane Asylum, which was located on the site of the University of Mississippi Medical College (UMMC) from 1855 to 1935.  After a University construction crew discovered coffins from the Asylum’s cemetery in 2012, many descendants contacted news sites and the university to request details and offer information.  The proposed events would seek to reach and unite the interested members of the descendant community and provide information about collective identity and history through family stories, historical context, and analysis.  History students from Jackson State University and Millsaps College would assist in collecting contextual information, and, with donor permission, digitized items would be made available via the UMMC library’s digital archive.

This project explores family and cultural memory of the Mississippi State Insane Asylum (1855 to 1935) descendant community by gathering, documenting and providing access to untold histories of family involvement with the Asylum and what that involvement has meant to descendants. It is significant to community members because it will preserve previously undocumented historical materials related to the Asylum, bring the Asylum descendant community together as co-authors of the Asylum’s history, collect evidence of the Asylum’s place in the community’s cultural memory, share information with the community about the Asylum’s history that is currently known, and educate the descendant community about the importance of preserving its past and how to do it. It includes 2 days of digitization, oral history, public exhibition of donated materials, preservation seminars, discussions of Asylum history, cultural memory and ethics, and descendant community input for future programs.

A day-long digitization event, by-appointment collecting visits to neighbors’ homes, and a public interpretation event to document and explore the history of Lakeland, an African American community in Prince George's County, Maryland.  The proposed project would build upon an existing collaboration between the Lakeland Community Heritage Project (LCHP), which is Lakeland’s volunteer-run historical society, and the American Studies Department and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, College Park.  The project seeks to deepen understanding of the impact of desegregation and urban renewal as experienced by Lakelanders through their own keepsakes and historical documents.  Professor Sies, the project director, is an expert in suburban community studies, and with the LCHP, she co-developed the Lakeland Digital Archive, to which the new materials would be added and made publicly available.

Lakeland (1890) was central among a group of historic African American communities from Prince George’s County, MD. Between 1950-1980, Lakeland experienced upheaval and change, particularly a contentious school desegregation process, urban renewal, and subsequent dispersal of residents. The grant will fund two kinds of collecting activities and a public interpretation event. A daylong event will invite Lakeland residents to bring items from this period to be digitized: images, letters, personal papers, artifacts, scrapbooks, and the like, followed by educational workshops about the importance of and best practices for preserving materials about their heritage. Team members will also visit households with a portable archival kit to digitize and preserve their papers. Later, the team and humanities consultants will present an interpretive program on the newly collected archival materials and moderate a community conversation about the changes Lakeland experienced between 1950-80.

Two day-long digitization events to document Bainbridge Island’s family histories through photographs, letters, journals and diaries, newspaper articles, employment records, signs and posters, and other two-dimensional artifacts.  Volunteers would record brief oral histories that relate to the artifacts themselves, putting them into a familial or community context.  A partnership between the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum and Kitsap Regional Library, Bainbridge Island Branch, the project would offer the community an exhibit and three public lectures featuring the items brought in for digitization, organized around the themes of maritime history, logging and sawmills, and the Island’s agricultural heritage.  The project would seek participation among minority groups, such as Native Americans, Filipino Americans, and Japanese Americans, whose history on the island is inextricably linked to the region’s economic development.  With donor permission, the materials would be preserved at the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum.

This project will explore the opportunities that drew immigrants to Bainbridge Island, WA, and thereby came to define its cultural heritage: shipbuilding, the lumber industry, and strawberry farming. Community members with a family tradition of these activities will bring photographs, letters, journals and other artifacts to be digitized at two full-day events at Bainbridge Island Public Library (BPL). Participants will receive a digital copy of their materials on USB drives, and will be invited to record brief narratives relating the significance of the material to their families. With the consent of owners, digitized material will be accessioned into the permanent collection of Bainbridge Island Historical Museum (BIHM), with transcribed narratives incorporated into metadata. After the event, BIHM will create a temporary exhibit of digitized artifacts at PBL and offer a series of public lectures exploring themes including transnationalism, multiculturalism and boom/bust economies.

Two community digitization days and a day-long outreach event to discuss immigration history and Korean-American communities around the United States. The applicant would undertake this project to digitize and preserve heritage materials in cooperation with the Wing Luke Museum. Events would raise awareness of the importance of family collections and heritage among community members. The project would focus on family collections and materials that document domestic life, immigration, small businesses, and community organizations. Project staff would draw on contributed materials to create lesson plans encouraging teachers to integrate the subject matter into primary education. With permission, digitized items would be made available through the Wing Luke Museum’s website.

The Korean American Historical Society (KAHS) in partnership with the Wing Luke Museum plans to collect the kinds of things that show us what it means, and meant, to be Korean American. KAHS will conduct two to three public events to digitize this material followed by a community discussion lead by Professor Moon Ho Jung. The community event will focus on the larger Korean and United States historical context of the collected materials. We will also develop a curriculum for the 60 Korean language schools in Washington to pass on the lessons of the compilation to the next generation. To achieve these goals we plan to reach out to second generation Korean Americans by working with Korean American civic and professional groups and Korean language schools. We do this because in Korean culture individual humility is important. Older Koreans often consider their individual stories insignificant. However their children have the perspective to realize the importance of these individual stories.The Korean American Historical Society in partnership with the Wing Luke Museum plans to collect the kinds of things that show us what it means, and meant, to be Korean American. KAHS will conduct two to three public events to digitize this material followed by a community discussion lead by Professor Moon Ho Jung. The community event will focus on the larger Korean and United States historical context of the collected materials. We will also develop a curriculum for the 60 Korean language schools in Washington to pass on the lessons of the compilation to the next generation. To achieve these goals we plan to reach out to second generation Korean Americans by working with Korean American civic and professional groups and Korean language schools. We do this because in Korean culture individual humility is important. Older Koreans often consider their individual stories insignificant. However their children have the perspective to realize the importance of these individual stories.

A digitization day and simultaneous presentation on Ladino history and culture in the Pacific Northwest. These events would be followed by a second public event that would study and interpret the heritage items digitized during the initial digitization day. Seattle is one of the major global centers of Ladino culture and language, and the community would be invited to contribute heritage materials documenting the local community, including postcards, letters, photographs, memoirs, travel documents, marriage certificates, recipes, musical notation, and other items. With permission, digitized items would be made available as part of the Center’s digital collections in collaboration with the University of Washington Libraries. Events would be co-sponsored by the university as well as the James Garfield High School.

The University of Washington proposes to host a one-day digitization event titled “Seattle’s Sephardic Legacies” at Garfield High School in Seattle’s historic Central District in May, 2018. This event will feature presentations by humanities scholars on the little-known history of the Sephardic community in Seattle, Washington, during the Great Depression, and trace the lasting contributions of this demographic to the city’s industrial and cultural landscape today. At this event, which will be open to the public, a team of University archival workers will digitize a range of materials written in Ladino, the vanishing language of the peripatetic Sephardic people of Europe and North Africa. With permission from the owners, these items will be included in the Sephardic Studies Digital Archive at the University of Washington, the world’s first and only robust library and archive of original materials pertaining to the history and experience of the Sephardic people.

Three digitization events at the Indianapolis Public Library focused on preserving local history materials. Follow-up public outreach events would focus on the area’s African American community, which represents over a quarter of the city’s population, and would highlight such topics as jazz, Negro League baseball, and land ownership. The events would encourage digitization of photographs, family and church records, personal letters, and other documents, with the possibility of digitizing audiovisual materials separately. With donor permission, digitized materials would be made available via Digital Indy, the library’s digital collections and exhibition site.

Everyday Experience: African Americans in Indianapolis will provide opportunities for the digitization of family heritage materials from Indianapolis’ African Americans, while also presenting engaging public programming to both educate and celebrate that heritage with the wider community. The Indianapolis Public Library will hold at least three public scan-a-thons to create a new digital collection focused on the African-American experience. Based on the items digitized, the Library will also host public programming to explore and provide context for the materials collected. Programming topics could include Negro League Baseball, Jazz on Indiana Avenue or an exploration of neighborhood segregation. With the correct permissions, the digitized materials will become part of the Library’s digital collections, available to the public, researchers and more. The project dovetails with the Library’s digitization efforts and creation of a Center for Black Literature and Culture.

Two history harvests to document the musical history and culture of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and public outreach lectures on the area’s musical history. The proposed project would support a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, and the Chippewa Valley Museum to gather family documents, artifacts, and stories. The goal of the project is to better document the city's musical history, particularly in light of the area’s strong music education efforts and recent surge in music performance around this small city of 68,000. The ethnic history of the area has given it a unique musical flavor, including many genres such as polkabilly, Norwegian and German concertina and polka, Ojibwe powwows, and Hmong music events, featured in a range of venues from churches to house parties to festivals. With donor permission, digitized items would be made available via an Omeka-based website. In addition to the events, the project would engage students in a public history course to curate online exhibits and record a podcast.

The Sounds of Eau Claire “History Harvest” will document and share the roots and cultural dimensions of a recent musical renaissance in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Over the last several years the community has reinvented itself as a “Music City” built on indie rock, festivals, and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s nationally-acclaimed jazz program. Building on that foundation and meeting a community desire for better music history, this project will facilitate local co-curation of its musical heritage from the ground up. Through contributing personal and family stories, artifacts, and documents, participants will work with public historians to digitally preserve and share the region’s music history. Including a variety of public programs – humanities presentations, musical performances, podcasts, a digital collection and digital exhibits – this project extends beyond digitization towards fostering a more dynamic local appreciation of the region’s musical past.

Two digitization days and a public lecture aiming to document local history and culture through foodways in Richland and Roosevelt counties in Montana. The project would focus on documenting foodways through family recipes, cookbooks, photographs of celebrations, picnics and fairs, records of homemaker clubs, and artifacts related to food preservation and preparation. Outreach events would explore local history and cultural influence, using such foodways as a lens to better understand local history and immigration. The effort to collect local history materials comes amidst the social and economic changes brought by the current boom in natural gas. The counties are also home to land that the Assiniboine consider their ancestral home, and nineteenth-century waves of immigration saw arrivals from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Russia, and Germany. Contributed items would complement existing collections of Montana cookbooks already digitized by the Montana Historical Society, which include few materials from these rural areas of the state. The project would, with permission, make digitized items accessible via Montana Memory, the state’s digital library portal.

Richland and Roosevelt counties in eastern Montana have long been subject to a boom and bust cycle, from homesteading to oil. The Baaken oil field spills into this rural area and the effects of the boom have brought profound changes. As communities here struggle with change, surviving food traditions provide continuity. Through a partnership of heritage institutions and Extension offices, this project will gather digital reproductions of food-related items that tell the history of the foodways of the area, with the digitized materials made available on the Montana Memory Project. Using those materials Montana food historians will present a public program that will interpret Montana food history and the food customs specific to eastern Montana. The program will improve the community’s understanding of their heritage by demonstrating the centrality of food to traditions and examining the role of food as a benchmark during times of upheaval and in bringing people together.

Eight digitization days and eight public programs to be held at different branch libraries in the Somerset County Library System. Public programs would focus both on preservation techniques for personal and family collections, as well as on local agricultural history. At one program, a local history librarian would discuss how the county’s library system grew out of a 1930 mandate to improve rural access to library services. In response, the county developed a book lending network, composed of staff, citizens, book trucks, schools, churches, and private homes. In addition, an exhibit on Somerset County’s agricultural heritage would be featured at the annual Somerset County 4-H Fair. The project would be supported by partnerships with community-based organizations, such as the Somerset County Historical Society, the Board of Chosen Freeholders of Somerset County, the Courier News, Franklin Township Public Library, and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. Digitized local history items would be made available on a county website, as well through a research portal, the New Jersey Digital Highway at Rutgers University Libraries.

Somerset County, New Jersey, is a true cultural mosaic. From its earliest history, it has grown from an epicenter of the farming industry to become a diverse community comprised of over 333,000 people, boasting over 8,000 acres of preserved farmland while also being home to powerhouse Fortune 500 companies. Somerset County Library System (SCLSNJ) plans to take the next steps toward building a community memory. We will embark on an eighteen-month series of eight programming and eight digitization events. We invite our diverse cultures to learn about their NJ history while also preserving it! SCLSNJ will partner with neighboring libraries, community and cultural organizations within Somerset County. Personal narratives and memorabilia will be digitized to forever add a personal mark in the history of the county, and the website MySomersetCounty.org will be expanded and designed for ease-of-use so that it might be a tool for future generations of researchers and community.

Digitization of heritage materials in two history harvests, collection of oral histories related to local history, and a community symposium to learn about the area’s history of tourism. The project would be coordinated by Grand Valley State University (GVSU) and the Saugatuck-Douglas History Center to gather and preserve historical materials about shoreline communities along Lake Michigan. Although tourism supports various economic, social, and cultural development in the towns of Saugatuck and Douglas, the history of this industry is little documented in historical collections. Public historians from GVSU and the community would provide history and interpretive information about the contributed items. Digital copies would be provided to attendees and held for long-term preservation in the digital collections of GVSU Libraries, Special Collections, and Archives.

West Michigan's landscape reflects the histories of a bustling tourism industry along the shoreline of Lake Michigan during the summer. Many of these areas were profoundly transformed, garnering reputations for their acceptance of minorities. The twin lakeshore communities of Saugatuck-Douglas, became an important touchstone in thinking about the region’s LGBT history as the towns became a “home for all,” including a college youth invasion, motorcycle gangs, beach-goers, concert-goers, as well as the LGBT community. Although stories are told about motels and inns that welcomed gay customers or lax policing of state liquor laws that banned serving homosexuals, few records or oral histories discuss these topics. This project documents the area’s rise to become a destination of the LGBT community and other contemporary stories through oral histories and digitization of objects, photographs, and ephemera while the people who experienced these times are still able to share them.

A community digitization event and public programs to preserve the visual histories of Dallas, Texas.  The proposed project aims to collect community materials related to Dallas’s motion picture history, especially from underrepresented groups, in order to redefine perceptions of how North Texas contributed to film production and consumption.  The applicant and project partner TAMI (Texas Archive of the Moving Image) would provide participants with free digitization of up to 1,000 feet of motion picture film, five videotapes, and two documents per person.  Materials would include motion picture histories collected and created by members of the community, including home movies and amateur films as well as print documents of local film production and distribution.  The University of North Texas would provide access to materials through its Portal to Texas History.  Community events at two historic businesses in Oak Cliff, one of Dallas’s oldest and most diverse neighborhoods, would promote engagement with public history and media preservation.  The proposed project would build on a previous Common Heritage award, which focused on preserving the visual histories of Denton, Texas.

The University of North Texas Libraries seek $11,859 to preserve and provide access to the visual histories of Dallas, Texas. This project will support the digitization and preservation of community materials related to Dallas' motion picture histories, including 30,000 feet of film, 150 videotapes, and 750 documents. We will support access and education by providing access to digitized content on The Portal to Texas History. We will emphasize the value of community records through public programming that situates Dallas within Texas' film history and explores the evolving urban landscapes of one of Dallas' most diverse and historic neighborhoods, Oak Cliff. Focusing on materials related to our filmic past-home movies, amateur film, advertisements, and photographs-we will illuminate the value of community records and redefine how cities like Dallas contributed to film history.

Three digitization events to collect local history materials and a complementary public outreach symposium focused on Native American history in Chicago. The events would be managed by Northwestern University in collaboration with Chicago’s American Indian Center. Current historical collections about Native Americans in Chicago focus largely on organizational records rather than community history, so the proposed project would solicit photographs, newsletters, artwork, and other objects that document the history of the community. With donor permission, digitized items would be preserved through the Northwestern University Libraries, which would also make the materials available through a digital exhibit.

This digitization event and digital archive project will help to preserve previously undocumented materials about the American Indian Center of Chicago (AIC), focusing especially on its importance to the Chicago Native American community between 1960 and the present. The event will enable the AIC community to share their materials and memories with one another at several community events. The project will result in a digital archive through which they can continue to access their heritage materials and share them with the general public.

Six digitization events around the community of Rugby, North Dakota, which would aid in the digitization and preservation of historical items from Pierce County. Project outreach would be accomplished through mobile exhibits and digital projects, including short videos about the community’s history, which will be available through the Geographical Center Historical Society. Project staff would gather metadata and permissions from donors, and would coordinate the scanning of documents, film, slides, and photographs.

The goal of the Geographical Center Historical Society’s “Preserving and Presenting the History of the Geographical Center of America, Pierce County, North Dakota” project is to help area residents digitally preserve historic photographs, letters, diaries and other documents and to archive those documents for future reference at Prairie Village Museum, Rugby. The Society will host document scanning events at various locations and at Prairie Village Museum, which is operated by the Society. Using digitized documents and student-conducted interviews, students at Rugby High School will create a video on the region’s early history. Museum staff will use scanned documents to create a mobile exhibit. The video and the exhibit will debut at the Society’s annual Spring Kick-Off and storytelling event. This digitization project is important because it will preserve previously undocumented historical materials and educate the community on the how’s and why’s of preserving the past.

A digitization day and a public symposium focused on the history and material culture of African American house music, dance, and culture in Chicago from the late 1970s to the end of the twentieth century. The events would solicit photographs, posters, flyers, clothing, and other materials that document the history of this music scene. In addition, events would provide tutorials on the preservation of various heritage materials. With donor permission, digitized items would be accessioned by the archives of the Center for Black Music Research (CBMR) at Columbia College Chicago. Historians from the CBMR would also provide historical context about the history of African American music in Chicago.

From Warehouse to Web will establish a foundation from which leaders can continue to develop programming opportunities for archiving and sharing digital ephemera from the house music era beginning in the 1970s and 1980s evolving to the present, as well as creative documentation of sartorial expressions. Project collaborators Center for Black Music Research, Modern Dance Music and Archiving Foundation, Links Hall, and Honey Pot Performance will create stable, variable types of digital access through online platforms. It is essential that these vital records of Chicago, American, and queer of color cultural history are preserved and shared in years to come. By creating new access points to previously balkanized private collections of historical materials, Warehouse to Web will do something entirely new for Chicago’s grassroots house music communities, who have yet to see an approach that honors everyday participants in the culture, as opposed to the most popular and profitable artists.

Two community digitization days in Canóvanas, a city in the northeastern part of Puerto Rico, to collect photographs and memorabilia from area residents. The project would bring together the municipal government of Canóvanas, the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, and the Universidad del Este, whose library staff would be in charge of archiving and describing the items brought in for digitization. The project would invite community members to document the economic and cultural aspects of the town’s history, highlighting its transformation from a small sugar cane outpost to a complex “bedroom community” on the fringes of San Juan. The digitized images would be exhibited and presented in four venues: the Piñero House Museum, the Public Library in the Campo Rico sector, the town square, and the Municipal Center for Aging. A workshop is also planned for local public and private schools, entitled “Interpreting Images: Our Town in History.”

"Recovering memories: Canóvanas constructs its history" is a collaborative effort of the Jesus T. Pinero Library and Research Center of the Universidad del Este, the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture and the Municipality of Canóvanas designed to record this history and a wide-scale discussion of the major cultural and economic changes that have marked the area.

A day-long digitization event to capture documents and artifacts from two distinctive communities that remain underrepresented in the region’s historical record: the African American and Jewish residents of Hopkinsville and Christian County, Kentucky.  In partnership with the Museums of Hopkinsville, the applicant would also organize a second day-long public event with panel discussions and workshops, providing the opportunity for the project partners to share what they have learned and to engage the communities in preserving, interpreting, and commemorating their memories and stories. The panel discussions would serve to contextualize the digitized materials within broader historical frameworks, and the workshops would offer information about preserving family documents and photographs and conducting oral history interviews.

Rooted in the slave economy of the 19th century, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, has long been racially divided. Despite being a microcosm of race relations in the United States, little information and few artifacts have been collected pertaining to African American residents. In addition, there is little primary source material available about Jewish residents who acted as a bridge between the black and white communities.  "Integrating Segregated Histories," a project between the Kentucky Historical Society and the Museums of Hopkinsville, seeks to remedy this deficiency. Project partners will invite residents to a day-long digitization event to share experiences, archival materials, and artifacts. This project will also open a dialogue about the current state of race relations.  A follow-up event, including panel discussions and workshops, will place the materials—and conversations—into a larger context, showing residents how their path forward is firmly rooted in the past.

Fifteen digitization day events across the entire state of Connecticut to collect materials related to the state and its population’s involvement in the First World War.  The state played a role in the war effort from the beginning as a major manufacturing hub for firearms and as the home of the U.S. Navy’s first submarine base.  The applicant also notes that this history represents diverse communities, as many African Americans from the South and European immigrants came to work in the factories.  Digitized items would be housed in the Connecticut Digital Library, which is also a hub for the Digital Public Library of America. Along with the digitization days, public events would include lectures related to Connecticut and World War I, with a focus on the particular communities in which the events are held.

This  project is based on the commemoration of the First World War. Working with partners across the state, the State Library will conduct Digitization Day events to surface privately held photos, letters and keepsakes that tell the stories of individual men and women who served during the war. These objects and stories are often held by children of WWI veterans and are in danger of disappearing, as younger generations no longer have ties to the people and events associated with these objects. Through digitization we will preserve them for generations to come.

Five digitization days and a variety of public programming events to capture the memories and artifacts of Hmong community members in Catawba County, just east of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Home to the fourth largest population of Hmong immigrants in the United States, Catawba attracted many refugees from Laos after the Vietnam War. This project seeks to document the experiences and contributions of the Hmong community through a partnership between the Catawba County Library, the Historical Association of Catawba County, the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, and two community organizations, Hmong Southeast Puavpheej and Hmong Carolinas, Inc. Members of the Hmong community would be invited to digitize their documents, photos, and letters, and encouraged to provide oral histories for future generations. All of the cultural heritage items, digitized with permission, would be saved on the library’s computer network and published via the Digital Heritage NC website to enable broader public access. Among other public programs planned, the library would host a presentation in June 2017 to showcase traditional Hmong dances and clothing.

The Catawba County Library will collaborate with the Historical Association of Catawba County and the Digital Heritage Center of NC to collect and curate a digital collection of the Hmong community's cultural heritage, making it accessible to the public by publishing the collection on the Digital Heritage website.  The library will host five collection days to gather materials and capture oral histories of our Hmong community members.  To further inform our larger community about Hmong traditions and history, the library will host three adult programs and three book discussions.  Hmong cultural heritage is currently underrepresented in our cultural institutions. This project recognizes the value of their culture and the importance of their history of migration and community building. The goals of this project are aligned with the mission of the local Hmong community organizations to secure and preserve Hmong art and culture and to practice, promote and coordinate cultural activities.