Funded Projects Query Form
145 matches

The digitization of 1,933 nitrate negatives from approximately 1920–1940, documenting the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences, its research and educational activities, and scenes from the surrounding region.

This project aims to digitize almost 2000 historical nitrate negatives, securing their content and transforming a currently unstable and inaccessible collection of images into an available resource for research, publication, exhibition, and programming. The collection documents the early 20th century through photography, with a wide array of significant subject matter including the Society’s history, the natural history, pattern of development of collection, research, and public education in western New York, and the history of general science, natural life, and culture. We intend to increase intellectual control of these images, create accessibility, and promote scientific inquiry by distributing content through an open access data repository, NYHeritage.org. Digitization offers an opportunity to capture the content of these at-risk negatives, establish accessibility, and restore their usefulness as information resources valuable to the humanities for current and future generations.

A Foundations project to assess archival materials, including 3,000 pages and 200 photos, held by the Sisters of the Order of St. Benedict, documenting the Native American boarding school experience at the White Earth Mission School from the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Activities include creating an index of archival materials and developing a digitization plan and intellectual property protocols. 

The College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University (CSBSJU), in collaboration with White Earth Nation (WEN) and the Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict (SOSB), will assess archival materials from SOSB’s White Earth Mission School and develop plans and protocols for digitizing and sharing the materials in consultation with technical and community advisors. The project will make this largely hidden collection of Native American boarding school archival material available to the public, scholars, and Native families, providing greater access to information on the role of government-supported religious institutions in forcing assimilation and repatriating school records to affected Native communities. The project is part of a sustained collaboration between WEN’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office, CSBSJU, and SOSB that seeks to redress historical injustices over the long-term and acknowledges that the work of reconciliation is never finished.

The Mountains to Metropolis Oral History Project will lay the foundation for a scholarly resource that documents the intersection of rural Georgia and modern urban development by collating, curating, and enriching oral histories in the Kennesaw State University Archives and Special Collections, which serves as the institutional repository for multiple oral history projects and constitutes a rich, largely underused resource. This proposal seeks to fund a pilot project to enhance access to oral histories in the KSU Oral History Collection. Since the 1970s, the collection has grown to include over 700 individual interviews documenting institutional and local history. Our team will select oral histories covering education; industries; experiences of African Americans; civil rights; politics and government; and rural life. This core collection will be indexed, cataloged, and preserved and made available through a custom portal enhanced with the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer software.

The identification and description of 152 Syriac parchment manuscripts from St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula (Egypt), development of a data collection tool, and contribution of content to the Sinai Manuscripts Digital Library. 

The Sinai Manuscripts Digital Library (SMDL) seeks to increase access to the over 1,000 digitized Arabic and Syriac manuscripts of St. Catherine’s Monastery through a multi-phased scholarly description project that will focus on the identification and description of texts and paratexts within the manuscript collections and on documenting codicological and contextual evidence. An NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR) Implementation grant will allow the project team to complete Phase 1 of this project: the identification and description of 152 Syriac parchment manuscripts from the collection. Through these activities and the resulting descriptive outputs, the proposed project will contribute to the larger Syriac Studies corpus and community and serve as a major research tool for significant new discoveries related to Syriac history and culture, as well as the history and culture of the Mediterranean, Byzantium, and the Middle East

Digitizing and cataloging approximately 15,000 pages of correspondence from the Amador family papers (1856–1949), which document the family’s personal and business activities in the border region of southern New Mexico and northern Chihuahua, Mexico. The primary sources would be made available through the library’s digital collections website.  

The Amador Family Correspondence Digitization Project

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, in collaboration with Historic Blenheim and the Brandy Station Foundation, are requesting a Foundations grant to facilitate the planning of a digitization project focused on Civil War graffiti houses located in Virginia and elsewhere and to build collaborative workflows between our three organizations. Our project, Off the Wall: Digital Preservation of Civil War Graffiti Houses, will develop a design document for an eventual implementation grant aimed at digitizing and contextualizing the graffiti and associated ancillary documents held by Historic Blenheim and the Brandy Station Foundation related to the graffiti in their two historic house museums. We will also use the Foundations grant funds to reach out to other Civil War graffiti sites to bring them into the larger project as it develops.

Digitizing 4,218 volumes of dime novels and story papers published by Frank Tousey. A partnership among five academic libraries—Northern Illinois University, Villanova University, Stanford University, Bowling Green State University, and Oberlin College—the project would provide images and full texts of the works, catalog records for the volumes, and indexed entries for the stories, series, and authors to augment an existing online bibliography of dime novels. 

The Tousey Project seeks to digitize the dime novels of Frank Tousey, the most sensational and prolific publisher of the format. Best known for his series marketed to children, Tousey made an indelible mark on American culture through the introduction of the first American science fiction hero, Frank Reade, and the popularization of stories about the outlaw Jesse James. This digitization project builds directly on the recently completed Albert Johannsen Project and the ongoing Street & Smith Project, with partners at Northern Illinois University, Villanova University, Stanford University, Bowling Green State University, and Oberlin College and Conservatory. In addition to making thousands of these publications widely available for the first time anywhere in over a century, the project will also add index entries for every story, series, and author to the online dime novel bibliography at dimenovels.org, which will be used to aggregate each partner’s digital dime novel holdings.

Digitization and updated catalog records for 3,336 audiovisual materials featuring performances, oral histories, lectures, and master classes from the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival from 1992 through 2010.

To support a large-scale digitization project of one-of-a-kind physical media from the Pillow’s extensive Archives. This three-year project will focus primarily on a collection of 3,336 moving images (performances, talks, classes, oral histories, special events, and more) recorded from 1992 through 2010, that currently exist on obsolete physical media and are only accessible on-site at Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, MA. Additional materials to be digitized include photographs, correspondence, and other paper and photographic materials; these assets will provide invaluable contextualization to the moving images. This digitization work will make it possible to significantly grow our existing online resource Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive, will dramatically increase access to these unique resources, and will address critical preservation needs.

The development of a digital portal for access to journals, watercolors, and drawings of Indigenous peoples encountered on Maximilian von Wied and Karl Bodmer's expedition across North America in 1832-1834. The digital portal would offer multiple points of entry to the journals, artwork, a geocoded map, interpretive essays, and K-12 curriculum tools. 

Creighton University, the Joslyn Art Museum, and the Nebraska Indian Community College will implement a digital portal to increase public access and interpretation of materials related to Maximilian von Wied and Karl Bodmer's 1832-1834 expedition across North America. Staff will digitize, geocode, and markup Maximilian's Journal and Bodmer's artworks. Users will be able to browse and search the collection or follow the expedition using georeferenced maps, creating an integrated digital experience that allows multiple entry points into text and image. The project will enrich these resources with scholarly essays and ensure its broad impact through public outreach and a K-12 curriculum developed in coordination with Native American communities. The Natural Face of North America will be the most comprehensive public resource for the Maximilian-Bodmer expedition, provoking new and Indigenous-centered understandings of nineteenth-century America on the cusp of immense cultural change.

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.

The development of the Yale Digital Dura-Europos Archive (YDEA), a digital archive of materials related to the archaeological site of Dura-Europos, Syria, a multicultural center of the ancient world that has been threatened in recent years by looting and conflict.

The Yale Digital Dura-Europos Archive (YDEA) is a project aimed at increasing global access to, and comprehensibility of, data and artifacts from the important cultural heritage site of Dura-Europos (Syria). Using Linked Open Data (LOD), YDEA endeavors to create a comprehensive and extensible digital archive whose data points can be freely reused, and to develop a web application that provides multilinguistic access to the integrated Dura-Europos archival resources in a single interface, together with visualizations to enhance data intelligibility at a glance. The planned work will make c. 30,000 artifacts and archival documents searchable in Arabic for the first time. Looting at Dura since 2011 has regrettably compromised the site for future stratigraphic research. Accessibility of data from controlled scientific excavations prior to 2011 is therefore of paramount importance as the basis for future teaching and research, including anti-trafficking efforts related to the site.

The expansion of the AFI Catalog, the filmographic online database which documents the first 100 years of American cinema, by adding 45,000 titles and associated data for short films released from 1893 to 1933 and completing 6,000 records of short films from the silent film era.  

The American Film Institute (AFI) upholds the first tenet of its original mission -- to preserve the history of the motion picture -- through the AFI Catalog, an authoritative online resource recording the first century of American film (1893-1993). AFI respectfully requests a three-year, $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of a landmark project to include short films in its AFI Catalog database for an unprecedented effort to study the artistic contributions of women and people of color in early film. By documenting short subjects from the silent and early sound eras (1910-1933), the AFI Catalog will illuminate the work of diverse storytellers that have traditionally been omitted from history due to a lack of scholarly resources about short films. The inclusion of short films in the AFI Catalog will allow us to look behind the veil of historical bias to reveal the true diversity of America’s cultural legacy and bring marginalized artists into view.

The digitization of 267 reels of microfilm containing the Subject Files from the Time-Life News Service Correspondent Wires dating from the 1930s to 1960. 

The New-York Historical Society proposes to digitize 267 reels of microfilm of Time-Life News Service Correspondent Wires (1930s-1960) that no longer exist in hard copy. Submitted by a global network of correspondents, the wires comprise the raw reporting that Time and Life staff used to write stories and form an extraordinary trove of information about a tumultuous, defining period in United States and world history. Since only a small portion of the correspondents’ submissions ever appeared in print, and they have only recently been opened to researchers, digitizing this unique set of microfilm will result in an essential resource for humanities scholarship. This is Phase 1 of a two- phase project that will ultimately result in the digitization of 576 reels of microfilm. The goals of the project are threefold: to preserve the content of the collection, which only exists in this one set of master microfilm; to make it freely available online; and to disseminate it to a large audience.

Enhanced access to the papers of Dana A. Dorsey, who, as Miami’s first Black millionaire, developed the city’s Colored Town (present day Overtown) in the early twentieth century. This work would include transcription, georeferencing, and creating tabular data from the 291 records and 620 pages of legal documents that constitute the collection. 

This project aims to develop a set of preliminary data resources, based on the Dana A. Dorsey Papers held at FIU, that will expand our understanding of the interpersonal networks and investment by and for Miami’s Black community during the pre-redlining era. These resources will include (1) full transcripts of Dorsey’s financial papers, (2) a geospatial dataset plotting the properties involved in his financial transactions, as well as (3) a data set derived from his papers consisting of details about his transactions and, most importantly, the individuals involved. The core values of this work are centered on addressing the significant gaps in the historical record, critical engagement in data collection processes that are rooted in humanity through the histories of individuals, and the establishing of a model for future collaborative human centered data work.

A collaborative project to digitize, georeference, and make maps and atlases of Chicago published before 1940 accessible online. The project would include 1,167 maps from the Newberry Library, 2,934 maps from the Chicago History Museum, and 1,015 maps from the University of Chicago.

The Mapping Chicagoland project will digitize, georeference, and make accessible maps and atlases of Chicago from the Newberry Library, the Chicago History Museum, and the University of Chicago. The project will focus on making the earliest cartographic representations of Chicago accessible. The nominated collections consist of Chicago maps and atlases that were published in 1940 or earlier. Each institution’s collection has unique strengths that complement one another in scale, time period, and subject. The maps selected are among the most used at the three institutions but are also fragile in nature.

A digital preservation assessment, rehousing, and new finding aid for over 2,000 audio and audio-visual materials dating from 1936 through 2001 in the Alwin Nikolais and Murry Louis Dance Collection at the Ohio University Libraries’ Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections. The project team also would develop workflows and build relationships for incorporating metadata from expert sources.

The Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis Dance Collection is held by the Ohio University Libraries’ Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections. The collection is an invaluable record of American Modern Dance pedagogy providing a rich resource for students and teachers of dance, in higher education and beyond. This project aims to increase access to the collection and its extensive audiovisual formats in two ways. First an AV assessment will provide a roadmap for the Libraries to pursue digital reformatting and preservation. The collection contains valuable moving image and audio content that has not been broadly accessible and may now be at risk from degradation. Second the project seeks to create additional access points to a growing digital collection of non-AV material by working with the Nikolais/Louis Foundation to collect expert-sourced metadata. This approach opens opportunities for the libraries to deepen description even where subject expertise is lacking.

The development of a processing plan and pilot online project portal for archival collections representing six independent Chicago art galleries and totaling 800 linear feet of materials, including exhibition files, promotional materials, administrative records, correspondence, publications, photographs, slides, and audiovisual materials from 1973 through the early 2010s.

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (School), in partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago (Museum), will undertake a year-long Foundations process to plan for a full collections processing project for the archives of six notable Chicago galleries: ARC, Artemisia, Rhona Hoffman, Donald Young, Randolph Street Gallery and Threewalls. The School and Museum will create a processing plan for the six gallery collections, supported by preservation and content assessments for each, and pilot a public-facing Chicago Gallery Project website, created with the expertise of Chicago curators, archive staff, and artists. This site will enhance discoverability of the School’s and Museum’s gallery collections and similar content held by other institutions.

Planning further development of Washington College Starr Center’s “Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project” through an expansion of its digital collections and community engagement activities. Identified contributing partners would include four repositories that hold materials related to more than two centuries of African-American history on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. 

In 2019, Washington College's Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, with an $800,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, launched "Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project," an innovative collaboration among Washington College, the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, and a broad array of community partners in Kent County, MD. Chesapeake Heartland collects, preserves, digitizes, and makes accessible artifacts and oral histories related to the area’s African American heritage. With NEH support, the Starr Center can expand significantly the project's reach by bringing in items that are scattered in institutional repositories across the Chesapeake region, including the Maryland State Archives (Annapolis), Maryland Center for History and Culture (Baltimore), American Antiquarian Society (MA), and the National Museum of African American History and Culture (DC), broadening the project's scope to four centuries.

An Implementation project to create access through a collections database to Native language holdings at the Sam Noble Museum, University of Oklahoma. Activities include metadata enhancement, digitization, software development, and development of a web portal for access.   

The Native American Languages collection at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma seeks to fund a three-year project to provide online access to our collections for the first time. This project builds on the work of a previous NEH Foundations grant (PW- 269366-20) that funded workshops with community and academic partners to create the framework for a user-oriented website that will best serve the needs of our visitors and contributors. These activities will ultimately allow community members, researchers, and the public to make use of the collections Native American language materials in ways not previously possible. There are four components to achieving our goal of making the collections available online: 1) website development, 2) continuing archival software development, 3) digitization, and 4) collections metadata enhancement.

Reformatting and cataloging an estimated 1,000 to 1,200 hours of video and audio recordings documenting the traditional language, lifestyle, and culture of Yup’ik and Cup’ik Alaska Native people, which would be discoverable through the American Archive of Public Broadcasting website. 

The NUTARRLUKI: “Make Them New” project seeks funding to digitize, catalogue and share portions of a large collection of video and audio tapes documenting the lifestyles, cultural traditions and languages of the Yup’ik and Cup’ik Alaska Native people. This rare collection, owned by KYUK - Bethel Broadcasting Inc., reflects a unique, indigenous American population and is in critical need of attention if it is to survive, much less be publicly shared. It is believed to be the largest collection in the world of Yup’ik/Cup’ik related video content that captures the traditions, language and customs that were developed before contact with the West.

The development of a database and online portal to archaeological material at the Florida Museum of Natural History from three house lots at the colonial city of St Augustine. The house lots encompass material from the late 16th to 19th centuries. A total of approximately 52,000 artifacts and over 2000 documents, maps and photos, would be added – including pottery, architecture, clothing, and metals that document the diverse cultural representation in St Augustine at that time. 

The Colonial St. Augustine Project will rely on a sample of artifact collections from house lots from the city of St. Augustine, Florida to accomplish two goals: 1) develop an digital database that helps to describe the colonial history of the city based on archaeological investigations; and, 2) make that data freely accessible through an online web portal. Established by the Spanish Crown in 1565, St. Augustine is widely celebrated as the earliest colonial town in North America that is still an active community today. As the capital of the Spanish colony of Florida, it played a major role in the colonial history of eastern North America, and its later integration into the United States strongly shaped the character of the American South. The public website to be made available through this project will emphasize the importance of archaeological research for sharing this story with the American public.

The processing and partial digitization of 22,000 35mm negatives, slides, contact sheets, and prints, along with 20 oral histories that document the farmworker movement in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The Farmworker Movement Collection of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center contains 22,000 negatives, slides, and prints by American photographers John Kouns (1929–2019) and Emmon Clarke (1931–) taken during the 1960s and 1970s. The movement forged a broad coalition that pushed the country toward a more perfect union. The proposed project will create a digital database of this collection to digitally preserve the images and enable educational online access through the university’s Oviatt Library Digital Collections website. The digital archive will include 6,600 images 30% of the Center’s holdings). Dissemination activities include the creation of a multimedia website that uses this newly created digital photographic archive, 20 oral histories of farmworker participants that are part of the Center’s collection, and other publicly available digital resources, and the creation of a Do-It-Yourself educational exhibition for schools, community centers, and union groups using these photographs.

A Foundations project to plan for the development of an online portal to archival materials dealing with Wabanaki history and culture that are held at University of Maine’s Hudson Museum, Maine Folklife Center, and Fogler Library.  The portal would serve research, public, and educational audiences.

The McGillicuddy Humanities Center (MHC), the College of Education and Human Development (COEHD), and the Native American Programs at the University of Maine (UMaine) together with partners at the Maine Department of Education (DOE), and members of the Wabanaki Confederacy (the Penobscot Nation, Passamaquoddy Tribe, Aroostook Band of Micmacs and Houlton Band of Maliseets), propose to investigate developing a prototype portal to provide centralized access to, and increase discoverability of underutilized Wabanaki resources and archival collections distributed across a number of institutions.

The digitization, cataloging, and transcription of Duke University’s Behind the Veil (BTV) oral history collection of 1,200 analog master recordings and over 3,800 supplemental materials, including photographs and project files, to current digital standards. The collection, which illustrates African American life in twenty Southern communities under Jim Crow, would be published in the Duke Digital Repository.

“Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South" will expand online access to the the Behind the Veil (BTV) project archive, housed in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. The archive's provenance is traced to an oral history initiative from the early 1990's launched by the Duke's Center for Documentary Studies which interviewed African Americans from twenty distinct communities in the US South to document their experiences living through the era of segregation commonly known as Jim Crow. The BTV archive contains interviews with over 1,200 individuals and families, nearly 3,000 pieces of visual materials including slides, prints and photo negatives, and supplementary project files and electronic records. This proposal will migrate the archive's analog master recordings, photographs, and project files to current digital standards and publish the collection in the Duke Digital Repository with appropriate metadata and transcription.

The production of the fifth and final volume of the History of Cartography, a standard reference for the field of maps and map history. This volume, Cartography in the Nineteenth Century, would include an interpretive encyclopedia of 408 entries written by 193 contributors, to be made available online and archived digitally. 

We request an implementation grant for July 2021–June 2023 to advance towards completion the final volume of a major reference series, The History of Cartography. Work planned includes research and extensive preparation of Volume Five. This award-winning series is the only comprehensive and reliable resource to study the people, cultures, and societies that have produced and used maps from prehistory to the present. It provides intellectual access to the complex world of maps for scholars and the public. It promotes and sustains the humanistic interpretation of maps as evidentiary sources. Experienced editors, contributors, and staff thoroughly research and rigorously check its content. The University of Chicago Press is responsible for publishing and distributing the volumes, making them available to a broad audience in print, e-book, and eventually free online editions.