Funded Projects Query Form
43 matches

The Willa Cather Archive proposes to create a digital library of American novelist Willa Cather's literary manuscripts (broadly construed to encompass all pre-publication forms of her work). These materials are currently distributed across a range of repositories and are largely ignored by scholars and students of her writing. Our plan is to create a digital library of these materials that includes: 1) high-resolution images of each document, sufficient to facilitate close inspection of its details; 2) rich metadata about each item capturing its relationship to Cather's published work and other documents, its physical properties, the editorial hands visible on it, and other details about its creation; and 3) an expert-authored document analysis that describes, in straightforward prose, details about the manuscript that will help users make sense of its meaning and its place in the evolution of a particular work, including its relationship to other documents in the digital library.

Digitization events to collect local history materials in two communities in the South Bay region of the San Diego metropolitan area, Old Town National City and San Ysidro.  A majority of residents are of Spanish-speaking descent, many with family roots in the area dating before the 1848 border demarcation.  Photo archivists at the San Diego Historical Society would lead the events in collaboration with two social services agencies, Casa de Salud/Old Town National City Committee in National City and Casa Familiar/The Front Art Gallery in San Ysidro.  The events would feature workshops on preserving family memorabilia and be followed by presentations based on the digitized images by a local historian and author, Barbara Zagora.  With donor permission, the materials would be made available on the website of the San Diego Historical Society, the Online Archive of California/Calisphere, and the Digital Public Library of America.

Border Dwellers/Los de la Frontera will examine the border community of the South Bay, San Diego County’s. The San Diego-Tijuana international border is unique historically, culturally, and sociologically than other border locales, and yet the history of this region has yet to be explored. This project, the first of its kind in the South Bay, represents a critical first step in the recognition of the cultural heritage of its border residents. The San Diego History Center plans to focus on the cultural heritage of two South Bay communities: San Ysidro and Old Town National City. The digitization event and surrounding programs will collect family photographs, portraits, and documents like letters, military papers, and ephemera. A follow-up event will consist of a slideshow and history lecture presented by a historian based on the items digitized from the participants, and a discussion session for attendees to share memories. SDHC staff will be present to record these memories.

A planning project to develop a digital portal to information and archival sources on Mexican American art.  The activities would lay the groundwork for establishing future partnerships with small institutions and for building a database for Mexican American art nationwide.

The University of Minnesota, The University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, and the National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA) seek an NEH HCRR Foundations grant to undertake planning efforts for an online portal, Rhizomes of Mexican Art since 1848, that will aggregate Mexican American art and related documentation from existing digital collections across the nation. Art attributed to Mexican heritage artists living in the United States is a rich aesthetic tradition that enhances how humanities scholars think about American art, history, and culture. Co-PDs Davalos and Cortez with a team of scholars and technical specialists will convene online and in-person to produce three Foundations-level outcomes: 1) a protocol by which relevant content from small-budget institutions feed into Rhizomes; 2) a curated search strategy, new metadata, and controlled vocabularies; and 3) submission of proposals for adoption of new metadata schema by the Getty Research Institute and the NMMA.

A digitization event held at the Boston Public Library’s central branch in Copley Square at which staff from University Archives and Special Collections of the University of Massachusetts Boston would invite members of the community to share materials related to the city’s hip-hop culture: demo tapes, performance videos, flyers, posters, photographs, clothing, and accessories. Items would be digitized for the participants’ personal use and, with their permission, possibly included in the Massachusetts Hip-Hop Archive, which is housed on UMass Boston’s Open Archives. The resulting digital collections would be harvested by the Digital Commonwealth and the Digital Public Library of America, making these materials and the participants’ stories discoverable to a wide-reaching audience. Boston Public Library would also present a series of four public programs celebrating and exploring elements of hip-hop culture: rapping (MCing), DJing (turntabling), breakdancing (b-boying), and graffiti art (graff). The events would include demonstrations by local artists, invite public participation, and be guided by two scholars of hip-hop music and culture, Dasan Ahanu from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Michael Jeffries from Wellesley College.

The University Archives and Special Collections (UASC) in the Joseph P. Healey Library at the University of Massachusetts Boston requests a Common Heritage Grant in the amount of $11,919. This grant will allow UASC to collaborate with the Boston Public Library (BPL), the Boston hip-hop community, and noted scholars Dasan Ahanu and Michael Jeffries to accomplish two goals: host a digitizing day to collect artifacts and stories that will be uploaded to the Massachusetts Hip-Hop Archive; and present four public outreach programs showcasing the four original elements of hip-hop culture: rap, DJing, dance, and graffiti art, contextualizing the materials collected at the digitization event. Community members who participated in the development of hip-hop culture in Massachusetts will contribute artifacts to the event and serve as audience and participants in the public programs, thereby documenting, preserving, and celebrating cultural memory from a marginalized part of the state’s history.

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

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

Production of an anthology of African American poetry and an accompanying series of reading and discussion programs.

Library of America requests a grant in the amount of $458,418 in partial support of Lift Every Voice: Why African American Poetry Matters Today, a major national initiative to explore and reassess the multifaceted African American poetic tradition, its complex engagement with American history over 250 years, and its ongoing relevance to our national life. The project has two related objectives. One is to bring together Americans of varied backgrounds around the country to engage with the richness of this essential American tradition in ways that illuminate the continuities and discontinuities between past and present and offer context and insight into questions that remain of vital national importance. The second is to make permanently available a groundbreaking anthology reflecting several generations of scholarly and archival research and rediscovery that will encourage exploration and discussion of the tradition’s meanings and resonances long after the project is over.

Two days of digitizing community contributions, including personal and official correspondence, photographs, diaries, recipe books, beloved objects, scrapbooks, and other materials to illuminate the life and history of the Latino communities of the South Carolina Low Country. The Citadel would partner with several local organizations for this project: the Special Collections department at the College of Charleston’s Addlestone Library (a local affiliate of the South Carolina Digital Library and the Digital Public Library of America), the Charleston County Public Library, El Círculo Hispanoamericano de Charleston, the Hispanic Business Association, and radio El Sol AM 980. The project would recruit bilingual volunteers from the Citadel, the College of Charleston, and Charleston Southern University to help staff the events and translate for the creation of metadata to describe the items brought in for digitization. This project would build on an existing oral history program at the Citadel focused on the Latino community. Of particular interest to the project organizers is the history of the development of Latino-led institutions, such as businesses, civic groups, and churches in the area. During Hispanic American Heritage month of 2017 (Sept. 15 to Oct. 15), the project directors would return to Charleston public libraries to hold community forums to present some of the items brought in during the digitization days.

The Citadel Oral History Program is offering a series of public programs and digitization events for the Latino community. Harvest days will take place in the spring of 2017 at Charleston County libraries (Johns Island and North Charleston). The materials collected will be processed and evaluated during the summer and deposited with the College of Charleston's Special Collections. During Hispanic Heritage month of 2017, we will return to the libraries to hold community forums to present the results of the project. Citadel professors Aguirre and Taylor will draw from the materials that we gathered to facilitate discussions on immigration, identity, exclusion and belonging, community building and civil rights. The forums will attract students, workers, scholars, and activists. The materials will be shared with the public through the Low Country Digital Library. We will continue to promote "Aqui Estamos" and encourage teachers to use the collection in the classroom.

Three day-long digitization events to document and preserve historical sources relating to the African American experience in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia. The digitization events would each be held at different venues, including the East Athens Resource Center, the historic First A.M.E. Church, and the Athens-Clarke County Library, and the materials would be accessible online. With this project, the applicant aims to address the paucity of historical materials chronicling the lives of black Athenians in the region’s cultural institutions. The events would not only build out the collections that tell the stories of local residents, but also facilitate the community stewardship of the materials that document these stories, including photographs, scrapbooks, funeral pamphlets, church bulletins, and other objects, mementos, and artifacts. In order to provide deeper understanding of yhe experiences of African Americans in the region, public programs would also take place. Author Michael Thurmond would discuss his book A Story Untold: Black Men and Women in Athens History, and tours would be offered of the African American section of the Oconee Hill Cemetery, the First A.M.E. Church, and the Morton Theater in downtown Athens. Also planned are a course on researching ancestry taught by the President of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society and presentations on how to preserve, access, and use digitized items.

Spared Sherman's wrath but not the havoc of Great Cities, Athens' Black residents and their historic neighborhoods have fought for their existence.  With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, the applicant wishes to aid in the digitization of privately held historical sources relating to the African American experience in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia, at a series of three day-long digitization day events. These scan days will take place at the East Athens Resource Center; the historic First A.M.E. Church; and the Athens-Clarke County Library, where patrons will be able to convert special A/V formats using our conversion equipment.  Digitized material would be made available to the public with donor permission via our partnership with the Digital Library of Georgia and the Digital Public Library of America. The project would also include a public lecture series and tours of Black historic sites led by partner groups.

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

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

Implementation of a year-long project of public forums and smaller-scale public programs on the history of immigration in Minnesota that would also include a digital oral history project on recent immigrants’ experiences.

Global Minnesota: Immigrants Past and Present, a year-long series of dynamic public
programming organized by the Immigration History Research Center (IHRC) at the University
 of Minnesota, will engage diverse public audiences across the state in ongoing public
reflection on immigration's role in shaping American life. The IHRC will collaborate with
humanities scholars and community organizations to produce public forums, programs, and
educational resources that discuss a wide range of multigenerational immigrant histories in
Minnesota, a state with a long and rich history of both “old” and “new” immigration. The IHRC
is requesting funding from the Humanities in the Public Square program to support both
large-scale public forums with award-winning writers and scholars and smaller-scale
community-based programs and discussions during 2016, which will cost a total of $205,800.
We are requesting $148,015 from the NEH and will cost share the remainder.

A day-long digitization event and subsequent follow-up to preserve cultural heritage materials held by members of the New Bedford area fishing community, and attendant public programming. The applicant would partner with the University of Massachusetts, Boston, which has run the “Mass Memories Road Show.” University staff would provide support during the digitization day and would also train volunteers. Images would be stored in the University’s digital collections, as well as at New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center, the Digital Commonwealth, and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Items anticipated for scanning include photographs, documents, and artifacts. Public programming would have three themes: sustaining community, life on shore, and life at sea. Programs would include presentations by members of the fishing community before the digitization day event at the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center; a workshop by New Bedford Public Library staff on proper archival storage on the day of the event; and an exhibit of digitized materials after the event.

The New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center proposes to digitize the cultural heritage of the local fishing community. Commercial fishing is often a family activity with skills and knowledge passed from one generation to the next. Consequently, much of this history resides in the photo albums, documents, and artifacts of fishing families. This project will digitize these materials through a day-long public event in combination with “house calls” to digitally document materials from individuals who are unable to attend the event. The project will be bookended by a variety of public programs which will serve to inspire community participation, evoke memories, and provide an interpretive framework for materials that are brought forward. Digitizing these materials, making them publicly available, and using them to tell the story of the fishing community will create a lasting legacy for families who have spent generations working the water in what is one of the nation’s oldest occupations.

Digitization of 182,264 pages of archival records and 291 hours of audiovisual recordings of the Independent and Webster Commissions, convened to investigate the 1991 Rodney King beating and the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles.

Our project will digitize for free online public access the records of the Independent and Webster Commissions, which investigated the causes of the 1991 Rodney King beating and the 1992 civil unrest. Upon its conclusion, we will publish 182,264 pages of historical records and 291 hours of audiovisual recordings in the USC Digital Library and the Digital Public Library of America.

The arrangement and description of 800 cubic feet of archival material documenting the history of the Guthrie Theater from 1963 to the present.

The University of Minnesota Libraries seeks $137,020 in NEH funding to support an 18-month project to arrange, preserve, and describe the records of the nationally-recognized Guthrie Theater (guthrietheater.org) to current archival standards. Additionally, we will actively work with the Guthrie Theater leadership and staff to review and revise the current records management plan in order to address institutional changes and to create a sustainable plan for future accruals that includes born digital records. The work of gaining adequate intellectual and physical control of the collection is the necessary first step in making these materials publicly available through digitization, which is being planned for 2016. In the course of arranging and describing the materials, we will identify and flag materials that can be digitized at this later stage for thematic inclusion in national digital aggregation initiatives, such as the Digital Public Library of America.

H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), the prolific author, editor, newspaperman, and philologist, influenced two generations of writers, spanning the period from World War I through the 1920s. In light of Mencken's importance to the nation's cultural and literary heritage, I have been chosen to edit his autobiographical trilogy, "Happy Days, Newspaper Days and Heathen Days." This scholarly Library of America edition will also include the first publication of Mencken's "Additions, Corrections and Explanatory Notes," the last major primary historical documents released under time-lock. New knowledge includes how he honed his craft as well as intimate details of childhood and family, filling in personal and historical gaps in Mencken's biography. In Mencken's attempt to draw serious and meaningful conclusions about his life, flaws and imperfections, the man who emerges is not the vague legendary figure but the actual Baltimorean, who influenced such writers as Sinclair Lewis and Richard Wright.

The incorporation and launch of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), a groundbreaking project that seeks to digitize and bring together the contents of our nation's libraries and archives, and make them freely available to all online. Project activities to be completed during the grant period will include the creation of four state or regional "service hubs," each responsible for developing a standard set of services to local organizations, and meetings with both service hubs and existing large-scale "content hubs" to formulate content provider agreements.

The DPLA Digital Hubs Pilot will take the first steps to bring together existing United States digital library infrastructure into a sustainable national digital library system. Foundational to the DPLA collection will be the rich historic materials held by archives, public libraries, museums, and historic societies across the country.These materials are important to historians, genealogists, sociologists and scholars of a wide range of humanities disciplines studying every aspect of American life. The goal of the project is twofold: to develop, test and implement the agreements and methods by which existing content hubs -- large scale digital content repositories -- become part of an interconnected national network, and to strengthen local services to institutions and communities and to develop guidelines for sustainable regional digital cooperatives, while enabling hub participation and data ingestion in the DPLA.

Implementation of a book, a public programming resource, and a website, all designed to encourage exploration of the ongoing meaning and uses of Abraham Lincoln's legacy in American history, society, and culture.

The Library of America requests a grant in the amount of $299,750 in partial support of Lincoln in American Memory (to borrow a title from Merrill Peterson's authoritative study): a book, a public programming resource, and a website, all designed to encourage exploration of the ongoing meaning and uses of Abraham Lincoln's legacy in American history, society, and culture. Organized to mark the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth in February 2009, Lincoln in American Memory will complement other projects organized to commemorate the bicentennial, including traveling exhibitions and public programming initiatives supported by NEH, for which our project would provide a unique and indispensable resource. The project is designed to make the Lincoln Bicentennial an even more significant and substantive occasion for public conversation.

Planning of reading and discussion and other programs to be held at 100 library or other community sites around the nation along with a traveling exhibition and an extensive website about Twain and his lasting cultural influence.

The National Book Foundation, in conjunction with the Mark Twain House & Museum, seeks a planning grant of $39,972 of a total budget of $62,401 to plan "Rumors of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated...: The Work and Life of Mark Twain", a series of public programs that will explore themes in the work and life of Mark Twain (1835-1910) on the centennial of his death and the anniversary of his birth. The planning process will include: 1) a national planning meeting , 2) development of an honorary committee, 3) draft of a Twain timeline, 4) draft of a useable bibliography, 5) draft of a filmography, 6) a survey of institutional holdings, 7) an outline for a travelling exhibition, 8) a speakers list of scholars, 9) a plan for recruitment of venues, 10) research on a new Library of America volume, 11) draft of a participants' handbook, and 12) a corporate and foundation funding packet.

The arrangement and description of 140.5 linear feet of correspondence and manuscripts, 1,500 photographs, and 48 scrapbooks in 18 collections held in the Library of American Broadcasting that focus on women in the broadcasting industry from 1920 into the1980s. A finding aid to the collections would be mounted on the Internet.

To support development of an editorial process, including selection criteria, textual authority, and production standards, for a series of American autobiographical and biographical writings.

To support the scholarly and editorial expenses for the first complete and authoritative edition of the plays of Eugene O'Neill. The three-volume set willconform to the textual, editorial, and manufacturing standards established for all Library of America publications.

To support a series of programs using themes in American literature as the sub-ject for lectures and book discussions. Works in the Library of America serieswill be used as the central texts for the programs.

To edit the previously unpublished literary manuscripts, journals, and collected correspondence of Mark Twain.