Funded Projects Query Form
126 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.

Project fields:
Anthropology; Film History and Criticism; History, General

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$70,511 (approved)
$70,322 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2022 – 5/31/2024

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

Project fields:
History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Medicine

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2022 – 5/31/2024

The digitization and migration to long-term storage of 932 oral histories comprising over 3,000 hours of first-hand accounts that document the history of the television industry. 

The ?Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation is home to The Interviews: An Oral History of Television. Formerly the Archive of American Television, The Interviews is a rare audiovisual collection of 932 recordings comprising over 3,000 hours of video-taped first-hand accounts of the evolving television industry from multiple perspectives. These oral histories, begun in 1996, face a crisis of obsolescence, as affirmed in a recent digital collection and preservation assessment. The Foundation requests NEH funding to support the implementation of a digital preservation and enhanced access strategy to ensure long-term stewardship and ongoing availability of a collection of immense importance to the history of the art and science of television, as well as to the understanding of?the nation’s cultural history more broadly.

Project fields:
Cultural History; Media Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2022 – 5/31/2025

The arrangement and description of 1,000 linear feet and digitization of 2,000 artifacts and ephemera documenting the history of pharmacy, pharmaceuticals, medicines, and public health in the U.S. from 1850 to the late twentieth century.

The goal of this three-year project is to improve the ability of researchers to discover, use, and access important historical and archival collections held by the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy (AIHP) and the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Pharmacy (UWSoP). The collections sit at the intersection of the humanities and the health sciences and provide valuable historical context about a range of contemporary issues related to pharmacy, pharmaceuticals, drugs, and public health. The project will (1) create a comprehensive and detailed finding aid for the Kremers Reference files, a deep, diverse, and uncataloged topical archival collection of about 1,000 cubic feet; (2) begin inventorying the significant and uncataloged AIHP and UWSoP ephemera and artifact collections that document the material culture of pharmacy; and (3) create an online freely accessible digital library populated by about 1,000 artifacts and 1,000 pieces of ephemera from the collections.

Project fields:
History of Science; History, General; Interdisciplinary Studies, General

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$326,326 (approved)
$326,326 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2022 – 5/31/2025

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.

Project fields:
Dance History and Criticism

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2022 – 5/31/2025

Planning for the creation of a fully searchable corpus of Maria Edgeworth’s letters through crowdsourced transcription, expert annotation, and TEI-encoding. Her letters are held at 26 libraries across the United States and United Kingdom, and this would be the first effort to unite them digitally.

The Maria Edgeworth Letters project provides open access to the thought and wide-ranging correspondence network of an extraordinary woman writing at the turn of the nineteenth century whose ideas on gender, race, religion, education, and science have important ramifications today. The grant would support the early stages of development of a digital edition of the letters of Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), an Anglo-Irish novelist and educational theorist who was more famous in her day than Jane Austen. Her letters, held at archives around the world, have never been comprehensively edited or accessible; this digital project will gather the scattered letters and create their associated metadata, allowing for network and other analyses. This collaborative endeavor between four universities provides research and learning opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students and engages the public through the Zooniverse crowdsourcing initiative.

Project fields:
British Literature; Women's History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$58,005 (approved)
$58,005 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2022 – 5/31/2024

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.

Project fields:
Native American Studies; Public History; U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,461 (approved)
$349,459 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2022 – 5/31/2024

A three-year implementation project to digitize and create online access to 26 archival collections of conservation records from sites in Egypt, ranging from prehistoric through Coptic, Islamic, and Jewish periods, and that are of interest to scholars, the public, and students and teachers. 

The American Research Center in Egypt is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting research on Egyptian history and culture, fostering knowledge about Egypt among the public, and strengthening American-Egyptian cultural ties. The proposed three-year project will digitize and publish online 26 collections of materials from conserved sites in Egypt, which encompass prehistoric, Pharaonic, Coptic, Islamic, and Jewish sites and monuments. Egyptian monuments documented in the archives contain a wealth of information for scholars interested in the history of urban design; the study of Islamic inscription programs; the evolution of mosque architecture; and other topics. Long-term, this project will create significant benefits to research, education, and public programming in the humanities, as it will provide easily discoverable, free, open-source digital access to the ARCE online archives for scholars and the public across the globe with an interest in Egyptian history and culture.

Project fields:
Archaeology; History, Other; Social Sciences, Other

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
9/1/2022 – 8/31/2025

Preserving and providing access to the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, a collection of over 75,000 pieces, including artists’ books, typography, and other artistic works that combine writing and images. The project would produce an archival finding aid for the collection, catalog records for approximately 4,500 items, and a website featuring collection highlights. 

The Sackner Archive is the world’s largest repository of material documenting the international avant-garde movement of artists and writers who combined words and visual elements to create a new kind of artwork. Now contextualized by complementary collections of Dada, Fluxus, book arts, and more, this new collection at the University of Iowa Libraries promises to significantly expand the potential for scholarship in 20th Century avant-garde. The Sackner Archive exists as a largely “hidden collection” due to the enormous amount of work needed to organize, catalog, and preserve the materials to make them accessible to researchers, educators and the general public. This Implementation Project will make the materials available to all by providing staffing to aid in the housing of objects, the standardization of metadata, and the creation of new finding aids, allowing improved discoverability for a large selection of collection material.

Project fields:
Art History and Criticism; Literature, General

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2022 – 5/31/2025

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.

Project fields:
Classics

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2022 – 6/30/2024

A Foundations project to plan for the accessibility of a dataset documenting demographics and social change in the City of Los Angeles and 86 Los Angeles County municipalities between 1950 and 2010. 

Our Foundations project will preserve and make accessible a remarkable dataset tracing many aspects of social change in the City of Los Angeles and 86 L.A. County municipalities between 1950 and 2010. In consultation with historian Becky Nicolaides (creator of the dataset) and an advisory board of humanities scholars, geospatial data librarians, and media organizations, we will develop file format and metadata guidelines, planning documents for a website, and a roadmap for publishing the data on public-access platforms including online digital libraries, linked open data repositories, and GIS and geospatial data resources. We will also publish a pilot collection for free online public access via the USC Digital Library, Calisphere, and DPLA.

Project fields:
American Studies; U.S. History; Urban History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$50,000 (approved)
$50,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2022 – 6/30/2023

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.

Project fields:
Public History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2022 – 5/31/2024

The addition of 200 entries to Encyclopedia Virginia to make more inclusive its coverage of the Revolutionary era (1763–1800), and the addition of primary sources, artifacts, lesson plans, and digital public history experiences, all in preparation for the 250th anniversary of American independence. 

This project proposes to develop content about the American Revolution and Early Republic (1763–1800) for Encyclopedia Virginia, a free, online resource about the history and culture of Virginia. In partnership with leading cultural institutions, a consulting group that specializes in collaborating with Native communities, and an educational consultant, Encyclopedia Virginia will develop and publish entries, primary resources, media objects, virtual tours, and leveled content that addresses Virginia history from 1763 to 1800—with a particular focus on the experiences and contributions of Indigenous people, Black people, and women.

Project fields:
History, General; U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$348,670 (approved)
$348,670 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2022 – 5/31/2025

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.

Project fields:
Public History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$50,000 (approved)
$50,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2022 – 5/31/2024

Planning for a digital bibliography of African American serials publications in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using the 6,500 entries in James Danky and Maureen Hady's African American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography (1998) as its basis, the project would integrate data from both open-source resources, such as Chronicling America, and proprietary databases, such as Readex’s Early American Newspapers and Accessible Archives. 

The Wayfinder Project: Revealing Black Print Culture to a Linked World, 1830-, is a collaborative Emory University Libraries initiative to update and republish James Danky and Maureen Hady's 1998 African American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography. Led by the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, and in collaboration with the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship; Research, Engagement and Scholarly Communications; and Access and Resource Services Divisions, it will add new serials to the bibliography and reimagine the current volume using a linked data framework to make it more searchable, discoverable, and usable. The Foundation grant will support establishing an advisory committee to guide the decision-making of the project team who will establish a data model, metadata mapping plan, cataloging standards, an editorial model, and design for online access for creating a digital version of this foundational bibliographic resource.

Project fields:
African American History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$46,630 (approved)
$46,630 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2022 – 5/31/2023

A Foundations project to plan for the preservation and access of a multimedia collection chronicling the experience of incarcerated people in California during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The University of California, Irvine (UCI) is fast becoming a center for incarcerated voices in the United States. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, UCI’s PrisonPandemic collection has received thousands of letters and hundreds of phone calls from incarcerated people describing their experiences in prison during this global crisis. With this Foundations proposal, UCI faculty and librarians seek planning support to develop processes for both ethically preserving this collection of stories (protecting incarcerated contributors from any risk of identification or retaliation) and maximizing public accessibility of these stories for research and public programming. If successful, UCI’s PrisonPandemic collection and digital interface will be the first university-based portal providing ongoing access -- and a model for continued acceptance and processing -- of these typically hidden and marginalized voices.

Project fields:
American Studies; Cultural History; Public History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$50,000 (approved)
$50,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2022 – 5/31/2024

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.

Project fields:
Dance History and Criticism

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$50,000 (approved)
$50,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2022 – 5/31/2024

A pilot project to create a digital collection of 20 African Arabic manuscripts from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University with images, translations, and brief essays.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Northwestern University (NU) in Evanston propose a two-year Foundations grant to pilot an open-access digital collection that joins the rich West African Arabic manuscript holdings of our universities’ libraries. The digital collection, called Maktaba (meaning “library” in Arabic), will display images of a sample set of 20 manuscripts from the UIUC and NU collections. To make the manuscripts legible and teachable for non-specialists, each manuscript will be paired with its English translation and a brief essay providing historical and cultural context. The planning period (6/1/2022-5/31/2024) will allow the project team to establish processes and test concepts that will inform expansion of the collection after the planning period. The Maktaba project contributes to ongoing efforts to decolonize the production of knowledge about African societies at large.

Project fields:
African History; Intellectual History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$59,571 (approved)
$58,413 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2022 – 5/31/2024

A Foundations project to undertake a collections assessment, design a geo-database, and establish metadata and digitization protocols for archaeological data from two areas around the site of Cholula (Puebla), Mexico, an important pre-Columbian urban and religious center, occupied through the conquest.

UCSAG-Foundations focuses on the initial development for a database that will be known as UCSAG (Urban Cholula Salvage Archaeological Geodatabase), associated with archaeological collections from the last 2,000 years in the Cholula area of Mexico. The Cholula collections have the potential to enable research for and tell the story of the rich Mexican indigenous history and living heritage before, during, and after Spanish colonialism. The collections from Urban Cholula, discovered through salvage excavations in two modern cities adjacent to Cholula's Great Pyramid, have the potential to transform understandings of how Cholula operated as a political and religious center during the pre-Columbian era, and continued to be a resilient locus of Mesoamerican culture throughout the colonial period. UCSAG-Foundations will design the database and determine the protocols to bring the attention of the world to these little-known, but incredibly significant humanities collections.

Project fields:
Archaeology; Latin American Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$50,000 (approved)
$50,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2022 – 3/31/2023

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.

Project fields:
African American History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$59,809 (approved)
$59,809 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2022 – 5/31/2024

The arrangement, description, and rehousing of 544 linear feet, which constitute the institutional archives for the San Francisco Art Institute, founded in 1871. Approximately 41 finding aids would be posted to the organization website and Online Archive of California, and 23 hours of at-risk audiovisual materials would be digitized and made available on the Internet Archive. 

The institutional archives of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) is an unparalleled resource, chronicling the 150-year history of the school and its vital role—as hub, incubator and repository—in the development of 19th, 20th, and 21st century art and culture. While this rich archival resource has always been open to researchers and has informed dozens of books, articles, exhibitions, films, lectures and college courses, it has never been as accessible or discoverable as its historical value demands. The project will significantly increase access to and preservation of this unparalleled resource through comprehensive arrangement and archival rehousing of the collections, digitization of at-risk audio-visual recordings, and the creation of detailed finding aids, which will be made available to a global audience online.

Project fields:
Art History and Criticism; Cultural History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$234,820 (approved)
$234,820 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2022 – 5/31/2024

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.

Project fields:
Archaeology

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$318,944 (approved)
$318,944 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2021 – 12/31/2023

The cataloging and digitization of the Mirskey Collection, a set of approximately 3,000 cinema scores published during the early motion picture era, dating from ca. 1895 to 1927.

The University of Pittsburgh Library System (ULS) seeks a grant to support the Mirskey Collection Digitization Project. This two-year project will process and digitize sheet music for silent [mute] film accompaniment in the Mirskey Collection (MC), held by the ULS Theodore M. Finney Music Library. The MC contains approximately 3,000 sets of “photoplay” music, or music published specifically for cinema orchestra, with each set averaging fifteen instrumental parts, for a total of approximately 45,000 pages. Music for silent film accompaniment is an important resource for humanities scholars and musicologists exploring media studies, popular music, historical art music, gendered activities, class and social stratification, and a variety of other areas. Yet, silent film music remains very difficult for scholars and performers to access. The proposed project will preserve the entire MC and make it freely available online for research, performance, public programming, and exhibition.

Project fields:
Music History and Criticism

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$145,897 (approved)
$145,897 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2021 – 6/30/2023

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.

Project fields:
History, General; Journalism; Latin American History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2024

The digitization and geolocation of maps, architectural drawings, reports, and related photographs to address humanities questions about concepts of desegregation, urban renewal, and racial distribution over time with regard to housing and schools.  The Mapping Urban Fracture project would create a virtual collection comprising approximately 700 new reports and maps created after 1989 and develop an access interface to research spatial segregation with meta- and geospatial data.

The Mapping Urban Fracture project will engage scholars, educators, and the general public through the digitization and geolocation of maps, architectural drawings, reports, and related photographs to address humanities questions about concepts of desegregation, urban renewal, and racial distribution overtime with regard to housing and schools. The project will create a virtual collection and develop an access interface to research spatial segregation with meta- and geo- data for broad dissemination to a variety of audiences.

Project fields:
Urban History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$325,043 (approved)
$325,043 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2024

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.

Project fields:
Native American Studies; Public History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$59,436 (approved)
$59,436 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2023

Providing access to a collection of oral history interviews about Yiddish language and culture through transcription, the creation of time-coded indices, and descriptive metadata enhancement.

The Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project seeks funding to enhance access to its digital collection of video oral histories about Yiddish language and culture in the non-ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. With this grant, we will create time-coded transcripts and bilingual indices for a large portion of our continuously growing collection, thereby increasing multilingual access to this unique archive. Additionally, we will align geographic and subject metadata to widely used formats and link the oral history collection to related digital collections at the Yiddish Book Center. Finally, we will make the archive discoverable on major scholarly search platforms and allow for integration into universal digital libraries alongside other humanities resources. These efforts enable researchers, educators, artists, and the general public to more easily access and utilize these invaluable primary source materials about the culture of an important ethnic minority in the US and beyond.

Project fields:
Cultural History; Jewish Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2024

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.

Project fields:
African American History; African American Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,178 (approved)
$349,178 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2021 – 6/30/2024

A plan for metadata standards, accessibility, user needs, and long-term strategic planning and sustainability for Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center’s collections, as well as the pilot implementation of a digital collections management system and online collections portal with approximately 1,000 digital items.

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center requests $50,000 to develop a pilot project creating online access to a part of its permanent collection. This will be an invaluable resource for scholars studying Black Mountain College’s history and legacy as it includes the creative output of groundbreaking figures in American culture from 1933 to the present, across visual, performing, and literary arts. Outputs for this planning period will include development and population of the back-end and front-end of a new collections management system, and documents detailing strategies and standards for future implementation. An earlier related phase, funded by the Luce and Windgate Foundations, involved the digitization of BMCM+AC resources which will be used as pilot data and media for the online collections portal. The project will take place from June 2021-September 2022. Full implementation at a later date will entail digitizing and adding the rest of the collection.

Project fields:
History, Criticism, and Theory of the Arts; U.S. History; U.S. Regional Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$50,000 (approved)
$50,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 9/30/2022

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.

Project fields:
Cultural History; History, Other; Interdisciplinary Studies, General

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals (outright + matching):
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2021 – 6/30/2023

Digitization of approximately 25,000 three-dimensional objects that represent 350 years of history in Philadelphia, including historical artifacts and fine and decorative arts. The images and associated metadata would be available to the public through an online database.

In an unmarked warehouse in a former industrial area of Philadelphia, the 133,000+ items that made up the collection of the now-shuttered Philadelphia History Museum (PHM) await discovery. Through a partnership with the Museum trustees and City of Philadelphia, Drexel University is becoming steward of this collection, called the Atwater Kent Collection (AKC). As the new steward, Drexel is planning an innovative model of a “museum without walls” that will allow the public to know—for the first time—the extent of what is included in this far-ranging, priceless Collection. As essential underpinning for long-term public programming, education, research, and institutional collaboration, this significant Collection of material culture must be accessible—particularly online. As part of this ambitious undertaking, Drexel is applying for a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Implementation grant to digitize the three-dimensional objects of the Atwater Kent Collection.

Project fields:
U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,964 (approved)
$349,964 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2024

A planning project to develop recommendations for curating, digitizing, and creating educational resources for a collection of audio-visual recordings, correspondence, print and promotional materials, and ephemera documenting the Contemporary American Authors Lecture Series, which focuses on African American writers and poets, at Marygrove College (now Marygrove Conservancy) from 1989 to the present.

A planning grant to preserve and digitize our collection of artifacts from 30 years of the Contemporary American Authors Lecture Series at Marygrove College.

Project fields:
American Literature

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$56,500 (approved)
$56,500 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 8/31/2022

The reformatting and annotation of 500 oral histories of African Americans from the Gulf South, representing the stories of people who lived through the transatlantic slave trade up to the present day, as well as the development of a new web search interface and 150 curriculum modules for K-12 educators.

An interdisciplinary collaboration between UF Linguistics, Oral History program, and George A. Smathers Libraries will reanimate 500 interviews with African Americans in the Gulf South, a population absent from many other oral history collections, with rich annotations and a web-based customizable interface. Our design harnesses computational linguistic methods and is informed by the needs and expertise of three diverse user groups, resulting in a host of improved accessibility outcomes. For education, teachers will be provided an easy to use interface to enhance student engagement with localized curriculum using the interviews. For linguistics, researchers will have access to an unprecedented amount of spoken African American data to investigate African American language change and regionality, and racially-based biases in speech technologies. Finally, oral history programs across the country will be offered a new means of enhancing accessibility into their own archival collections.

Project fields:
African American History; American Studies; Computational Linguistics

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,990 (approved)
$349,990 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2021 – 6/30/2024

The digitization of 400 rare and unique moving images documenting the human and natural history of the Colorado Plateau and the American Southwest, which would be made accessible through the Colorado Plateau Digital Archives at Northern Arizona University. The library would work with the Hopi Tribe, the Hualapai Tribe, and Diné College on the Navajo Nation to digitize and create access to additional films that are held by these partners.

Archival moving image materials have immense value for researchers, scholars, students, faculty, documentary filmmakers, K-12 educators, historians, and the general population. Cline Library's Special Collections and Archives (SCA) seeks funding to support the digitization of rare and unique moving images documenting the human and natural history of the Colorado Plateau. The 400 moving images in question are held by SCA and three regional cultural heritage partners: the Hopi Tribe, the Hualapai Tribe, and Diné College on the Navajo Nation (see Appendix letters). All together these moving images offer a glimpse into the collective past of the American Southwest as recorded on film. The digitized moving image content will be accessible online through the Colorado Plateau Digital Archives at NAU and selected titles will also be made available through the online digital resource Tribesourcing.

Project fields:
Cultural History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,526 (approved)
$349,526 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2024

The cataloging, digitization, and dissemination of approximately 35,000 avvisi, which were early modern manuscript newsletters, via the Medici Archive Project’s Medici Interactive Archive platform.

The main objective of the AVVISO Project is to digitize, preserve, catalog, edit, contextualize and disseminate the 35,000 early modern manuscript newsletters, known as avvisi, which were part of the Medici collection and are now housed at the State Archive in Florence.

Project fields:
Intellectual History; Public History; Renaissance Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
9/1/2021 – 8/31/2023

The digitization and transcription of recorded oral tradition and other documents from Tanzania’s ?Mara ?Region, compiled by Dr. Jan Bender ?Shetler ?between 1995 and 2010, to be included in the open-access Mara Cultural Heritage Digital Library (MCHDL).

An NEH grant would allow Goshen College to digitize and make globally available an extensive archive of recorded oral tradition and other documents from Tanzania’s ethnically diverse and neglected Mara Region, the only extant body of material from this region of its kind. Recordings, conducted by professor of history Dr. Jan Bender Shetler between 1995 and 2010 documenting over 300 in-person interviews with Mara residents, as well as other materials by local historians, contain a wealth of historical sources recounted in a variety of endangered local languages, up to this point inaccessible to students, scholars and residents themselves. Working in collaboration with experts in archival digitization at the Matrix Center at Michigan State University, linguistics consultants at The Mara Project at the University of Helsinki, along with partners in Tanzania, Goshen College will build on the foundation established to create and disseminate a curated digital library.

Project fields:
African History; Cultural Anthropology; Languages, Other

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$183,935 (approved)
$183,935 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2024

The preservation and digitization of 91 bound volumes and oversized flat materials that document the work of the People’s Relief Committee for Jewish War Sufferers (1915-1924), an American Jewish organization that sought to help Jewish communities and individuals in Europe during and after World War I.

The American Jewish Historical Society is seeking funds for the digitization and preservation of 91 volumes of archival materials documenting the history of the People’s Relief Committee for Jewish War Sufferers. The PRC was a very effective grassroots fundraising and advocacy group, initiated in the aftermath of World War I in order to send funds and relief to their Jewish brethren in Europe. While the PRC was relatively short lived, it was critical in the development of successor organizations, and the collection documents the work of the PRC and their collaborations nationwide and internationally.

Project fields:
Jewish Studies; U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$131,681 (approved)
$131,681 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2021 – 5/31/2023

Arrangement, description, rehousing, and development of a finding aid for 986 linear feet of records documenting the Agent Orange Product Liability Litigation class action lawsuit.

Funding to process and open to the public the New Jersey State Council, Vietnam Veterans of America, Inc. Collection, which contains 986 linear feet of documents pulled in defense of Dow Chemical, et al., for the 1984 landmark Agent Orange Product Liability Litigation class action suit. This collection is a little-known resource for the study of the production and use of Agent Orange and will help advance scholarship in a variety of different fields including business management, public health, medicine, biology, environmental science, political science, military history, and US legal history. We expect a very high level of use from this collection, as the topics of Agent Orange and its harmful effects, the history of the military's decision to proceed with its use, and the level of culpability of the major chemical companies in not making the dangers of Agent Orange well known are of incredible importance to Vietnam veterans, military historians, and public health professionals.

[Media coverage]

Project fields:
Legal History; Military History; South Asian History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$334,335 (approved)
$334,335 (awarded)

Grant period:
9/1/2021 – 8/31/2024

Digitization of 292 items related to the first naturalized American citizen elevated to sainthood, Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917), an Italian-American Roman Catholic nun. 

The Digitizing America’s First Citizen Saint Project is a three-year project that will provide digital access to the papers and artifacts of the first naturalized American citizen elevated to sainthood, Frances Xavier Cabrini. The output of the project will be digitized images of approximately 290 items, which include manuscripts, volumes of bound materials and scrapbooks, photographs, as well as a publicly accessible online OMEKA exhibit. This collection and exhibit have high research value as they document the life and work of this significant figure and reveal the history, religious landscape, and immigrant milieu of the 19th century United States. Once completed, this project will contribute significant content and context to understanding Cabrini’s life and contribution to American history and America’s religious history and allow for new scholarship relating to issues of immigration, education, social services, anti-Catholicism, and women’s leadership.

Project fields:
History of Religion; Immigration History; Interdisciplinary Studies, Other

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$148,561 (approved)
$148,561 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2024

The arrangement, description, rehousing, and creation of a finding aid for 384 linear feet of documents, manuscripts, correspondence, catalogs, meeting minutes, and ephemera related to the life and work of artist Donald Judd (1928–1994).

Judd Foundation is undertaking a two-year project to increase access to and improve stewardship of the largest collection of archival materials relating to the artist Donald Judd (1928–1994) by processing the Donald Judd Papers. Consisting of 384 linear feet located in Judd Foundation’s main office in Marfa, Texas, the Donald Judd Papers are the core of the Judd Foundation Archives and are comprised of materials pertaining to the life and work of the artist, including papers documenting his art, activism, architecture, furniture, and design practices; writings; interviews; correspondence; exhibition documentation and ephemera; financial records; and personal papers. The two primary goals of this project are to gain physical, intellectual, and procedural control of the Donald Judd Papers through arrangement, description, and rehousing; and to make accessible the rich documentation of Donald Judd’s work to the global academic, artistic, architectural, and humanities research communities.

Project fields:
Architecture; Art History and Criticism; Arts, General

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$155,257 (approved)
$155,257 (awarded)

Grant period:
9/1/2021 – 8/31/2023

Expanding the data platform of Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (Enslaved.org) through the addition of ten digital collections ranging from those held at small, local institutions to those at large, university-based special collections in the mid-Atlantic, the Carolinas, and the Lower Mississippi. These additional data sets would increase the Enslaved.org linked open data platform to approximately 1.3 million records.

This proposed project, “Expanding Enslaved Hub: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade,” submitted to the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Division of Preservation and Access, will support linking digital collections from ten collaborators to the Enslaved.org linked open data platform. The project will convene meetings to engage with stakeholders and build community around the long term sustainability of Enslaved.org and collections related to the study of historical slavery.

Project fields:
African American History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,744 (approved)
$349,744 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2023

Creation of a dataset from Bob Damron’s Address Books, a prominent travel directory used by LGBTQ Americans in the late twentieth century. From this dataset, the project would create interactive maps and visualizations.

Mapping the Gay Guides will explore LGBTQ spaces across the United States from 1965-2000 utilizing historical gay travel guides. The project will digitize twenty years of historical guides (1981-2000), transcribe the guides into data, and produce visualizations and pedological materials for use by public historians and educators to promote the study of local LGBTQ history. The site utilizes the Damron Address Books, a longstanding gay travel guide in publication since the early 1960s. Visitors to Mapping the Gay Guides will be able to explore tens of thousands of historical guidebook entries from all 50 states, D.C., and territories from 1965 until 2000. While recent historical attention is mostly centered on queer histories of large American urban centers like New York or San Francisco, Mapping the Gay Guides aims to understand the dynamics of LGBTQ culture through lost, ignored, hidden, or misunderstood spaces across the entire United States.

Project fields:
U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,894 (approved)
$324,418 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2024

The digitization of 24 cubic feet of archival materials documenting the arts, culture, social movements, and history of the Puerto Rican diaspora, primarily in New York City.

Centro is proposing to digitize some 23,500 pages (24 cubic feet) from 17 archival collections to create 6.600 new digital objects depicting One-Hundred Years of Puerto Rican History & Culture. This project will provide access to specialists and the general public to underutilized humanities-focused archival collections. It will unveil primary source material and enhance the ability of researchers and the general public to explore and discover unique documents highlighting the Puerto Rican community's creativity in several of the humanities disciplines: arts, literature and history. Using current metadata standards and an established content management system, the project will also highlight other disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to contextualize different forms of Puerto Rican creative arts and cultural expressions, and provides a better understanding of how migration, social and political movements, race, gender, class, sexuality, and religion shape cultural creations.

Project fields:
American Studies; Hispanic American Studies; Interdisciplinary Studies, Other

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,387 (approved)
$349,387 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2024

Cataloguing, conservation, and digitization of four collections from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century: the Huguenot Historic Street Archives; the New Paltz Town Records; Records of the Reformed Church; and genealogical records of the mid-Hudson Valley. Online access to the collections would be available through NYHeritage.org and a stand-alone project website.

Historic Huguenot Street seeks funding to implement the preservation and digitization of significant historical documents from its own archival collections, as well as portions from the Town of New Paltz, the Dutch Reformed Church of New Paltz, and the Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection at the Elting Memorial Library. The proposed project consists of early-American documents ranging from the mid-1600s to 1830 (the latter date encompassing the point at which most enslaved people in New York State were legally emancipated). The grant would fund: 1) cataloguing and metadata creation, 2) preservation, as needed, by a team of trained conservators, 3) digital imaging, and 4) making these digital collections available online. The project is based on planning documents developed under an NEH Humanities Collections and References Resources (HCRR) Foundations grant (2018-2020).

Project fields:
Cultural History; History, General; U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,999 (approved)
$349,999 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2024

The digitization of 1,284 books of vernacular sacred music from the U.S. South published between 1850 and 1925.

The Sounding Spirit digital library provides access to 1,284 books of vernacular sacred music from the US South published between 1850 and 1925. This corpus of gospel songbooks, collections of spirituals, shape-note tunebooks, and hymnals offers critical insights into the lived experience of Americans who used these works to navigate a modernizing turn-of-the-twentieth-century musical landscape. Led by a team of humanities scholars and technologists based at Emory University's Center for Digital Scholarship, the Sounding Spirit digital library includes six partner archives holding an impressive range of southern sacred song. Digitizing and making accessible works representing the sacred music making of blacks, whites, and Native Americans, and supporting their interpretation via digital collections and descriptive entries, the Sounding Spirit digital library recasts our understanding of American music for a broad public of researchers, teachers, and practitioners of sacred song.

Project fields:
American Studies; Folklore and Folklife; Music History and Criticism

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$346,781 (approved)
$344,687 (awarded)

Grant period:
9/1/2021 – 8/31/2024

Digitization of approximately 18,000 pages of early American church records and associated documents from five institutions in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, as well as the development of transcription technologies and workflows.

New England's Hidden Histories is a program, sponsored by the Congregational Library and Archives, to collect and display on its website all extant seventeenth- and eighteenth-century church records of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Maine as well as supporting ecclesiastical papers—diaries, synod records, sermons, etc. We propose to continue and expand ongoing efforts (funded by NEH in 2015 and 2018) to create a minimum of 18,000 new digital scans over the course of three years, along with finding aids and other tools (including transcriptions). We intend to expand our geographic scope to regions, like Maine, that are historically under-documented, and to strategically extend partnerships with like-minded institutions that embrace our mission and are eager to do their part to move it forward.

Project fields:
U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$289,300 (approved)
$289,300 (awarded)

Grant period:
9/1/2021 – 8/31/2024

The development and implementation of a public interface for research into medieval and early modern burial and commemoration through Digital Sepoltuario: Scholarly Access and Search (DSsas), a database and platform documenting the tombs of Renaissance Florence.

Digital Sepoltuario will support research on a fundamental human activity: caring for and commemorating the dead. It will make accessible a catalogue of memorials installed in Florence’s church buildings 1250-1650. Manuscript tomb registers (sepoltuari) in the Florentine State Archives provide information on location, ownership, and decoration of Florence’s tombs and burial chapels. We propose to interlink these records to social, professional, political, and family networks of those interred in these sepulchers over successive generations; substantially expand the dataset already curated; design and build an interactive interface enabling access to this rich material from several scholarly perspectives; and create methods to visualize spatial and social relationships. The creation and re-use of these omnipresent tombs are untapped sources to investigate and contextualize religious beliefs, power struggles, economic growth, and cultural products of the late middle ages and Renaissance.

Project fields:
Cultural History; Renaissance History; Renaissance Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,812 (approved)
$298,911 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2023

A reference catalogue of the French paintings, pastels, and gouaches in the collection of the ?Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, to be ?created with the open access ?publishing ?platform Quire.

The scholarly collection catalogue "French Paintings and Pastels 1600-1945: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art" represents the museum’s inaugural digital publication and will serve as the definitive resource for the interpretation and study of the museum’s collection of 106 French paintings, pastels, and gouaches from 1600-1945. Now in its twelfth year of production, the publication brings together the research and technical studies of over 35 leading scholars and conservators from around the world. As it is published incrementally online, the catalogue will be freely available on the museum’s website and fully searchable, making the collection accessible to a global audience while maintaining the museum’s tradition of high scholarly standards. To finish the entire publication by December 2024, the museum requires additional support from NEH.

Project fields:
Art History and Criticism

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$237,487 (approved)
$237,487 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2024

A one-year Foundations project to explore how Wikibase/FactGrid could move four siloed databases into a single online platform for access to scholarly research on medieval Iberia, including mapping of PhiloBiblon to Linked Open Data (LD) and Resource Description Framework (RDF), creating a prototype of certain modules, examining links between database access points and libraries, testing a model, and posting to GitHub.

UC Berkeley requests a one-year HCRR Foundations grant to explore the use of Wikibase on FactGrid. a database for historians as a technology platform for PhiloBiblon, which has supported scholarly research on medieval Iberia since 1975. The project will (1) study how Wikibase/FactGrid can move PhiloBiblon’s four siloed databases to an online platform with Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable data; (2) show how to map PhiloBiblon’s complex data model to LD/RDF as instantiated in Wikibase; (3) evaluate the Wikibase data entry module and create prototype discovery modules; (4) study Wikibase’s LD access points to and from libraries and archives; (5) test the Wikibase data export module for JSON-LD, RDF, and XML on PhiloBiblon data; (6) place software and documentation on GitHub. We hope to demonstrate that this project developed in the FactGrid collaboratory, can serve as a model for low-cost light-weight database development for similar academic projects with limited resources.

Project fields:
European History; Intellectual History; Spanish Literature

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$46,523 (approved)
$46,523 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 11/30/2022

Enhancing access to declassified governmental and other organizational records by aggregating documents from the Wilson Center Digital Archive, the Archives and Records Management Section of the United Nations (UN), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Archives, and the World Bank Group Archives.  The project would make the records available for research on an existing website, the Freedom of Information Archive (FOIArchive), as well as through library catalog systems and an application programming interface.

International, multiarchival research has dramatically increased the scope and sophistication of studies on contemporary world politics. But resource constraints and the increasingly obvious pitfalls of scholarship by search engine require novel approaches. We seek NEH support to internationalize the Freedom of Information Archive (FOIArchive), which is already the world’s largest database of declassified documents. The addition of the UN, NATO, World Bank, and Wilson Center digital archives will expand its geographical scope and temporal range, supporting both new international histories of the Cold War era as well as transnational and global histories of post-Cold War challenges. By harnessing data science tools, we will be able to extract or generate descriptive metadata and make them discoverable through multiple interfaces tailored to distinct research communities, including a user-friendly website, an Application Programming Interface, and Columbia Libraries' online catalog.

Project fields:
Diplomatic History; History, General

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,860 (approved)
$349,860 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2023

Rehousing, further cataloging, and digitization of the collection of Thomas Gage, who along with being Commander in Chief of the American colonies from 1763 through 1775 and Governor of Massachusetts Bay from 1774 to 1775, was responsible for managing all relations with Indigenous people in the British colonies from Canada to the Mississippi. The complete digitized collection would include 95,445 images with item-level metadata.

The Clements Library is applying for funding to support a three-year project to re-house and digitize the papers of British General Thomas Gage (1718/19-1787). Gage's papers comprise approximately 23,010 letters, documents, financial papers, maps, and broadsides, largely dating from his service in North America between 1763 and 1775. Gage was responsible for the management of all territory in North America east of the Mississippi River, including Canada. The Clements Library proposes to remove the items from their mounts/volumes and place them in archivally-sound folders and boxes, preserving their current arrangement and volume numbers. At the same time, two grant-funded digitization technicians will scan each item, crop and color-correct each image, and produce item-level metadata. The complete, digitized collection of 95,445 images will be made available freely online through the Clements Library's existing online digital collection platform.

Project fields:
U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2024

Completing the digitization and professional curation of 2,100 texts in the History of Black Writing Novel Corpus, refining the PhiloLogic user-interface (in partnership with the University of Chicago’s Textual Optics Lab), and developing its BBIP Scholars Program network.

Of the thousands of African American (AA) novels written since the 19th century, the overwhelming majority are unknown and/or understudied. The Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) provides a systematic approach to the study of these texts as a digital archive. During the course of the grant, BBIP will (a) produce and curate a digital database from 4,000 titles in its novel corpus; (b) refine its search user interface; and (c) support the development and dissemination of model projects through its Scholars Program. BBIP will be the most complete resource for project-based inquires in AA fiction, and serves as a model for bridging the digital divide in marginalized textual communities. By providing access to a wider range of cultural materials, BBIP advances humanities scholarship with benefits for research, education and public knowledge. The critical employment of computational approaches can raise compelling questions that push the study of AA literature in dynamic new directions.

Project fields:
American Literature

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$316,177 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2021 – 12/31/2023

A multi-institutional planning project to develop an online portal that would aggregate the personal papers of former members of the United States Congress.

The American Congress Digital Archives Portal Project proposes to digitize and aggregate congressional archives in an online portal that will expand access to collections and increase research value by providing context and linkages among them. Congressional archives are rich resources documenting the history of the legislative branch and illuminating multiple narratives about America’s social, cultural, and political development. The portal would provide scholars with significantly improved access to geographically dispersed collections and provide the general public and teachers access to civically important documents about Congress and public policy. With the expertise of congressional scholars, archivists, and technologists, this Foundations project will establish best practices for contributing materials and provide scope for a larger project by prioritizing materials to be digitized. A prototype digital portal will provide a model for future collaboration and digital practice.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
American Government; U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$59,115 (approved)
$59,115 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2022

Development of a reference resource of born-digital art historical records such as artist and gallery websites and web-published catalogs. Through the project, Internet Archive would develop an access portal to these web-archived collections, formalize standards and priorities for consortium members doing the web-archiving work, and develop datasets related to the resource and tutorials for using them. 

The Internet Archive, partnering with the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), which consists of the Frick Art Reference Library, MoMA, and Brooklyn Museum, proposes a two-year, Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Implementation grant from the NEH’s Division of Preservation and Access. This funding will create a comprehensive reference resource of the nation’s key art history and humanities collections published on the web. The activities of this grant will mobilize a diverse, national group of art and museum libraries to coordinate curation and the creation of a unified access research portal of web-based arts content.

Project fields:
Art History and Criticism

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$305,343 (approved)
$305,343 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2023

A Foundations project to plan for the inspection, reassembly, and digitization of a 16mm film and open reel audio production collection documenting the coal mining industry in the Appalachian region.

To digitize and preserve early film footage shot in the coalfields of central Appalachia held within the Appalshop Archive.

Project fields:
Economics; Rural Studies; U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$50,000 (approved)
$50,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2021 – 5/31/2023

The arrangement and description of 600 linear feet of archival materials from the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund (1967-1990) and the Emergency Land Fund (1971-1986), which document African American land ownership and agricultural communities in the southern United States.

This project will assist the Amistad Research Center to increase access to two large sets of related organizational records that pertain to African American land ownership and agriculture in the rural south from the 1960s through the 1990s. This project will entail the completion of archival processing for the two targeted organizational records collections, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund (FSC/LAF) and The Emergency Land Fund (ELF). Largely unavailable to researchers, due to their size and lack of organization, these records document an overlooked, but fundamental aspect of African American civil rights – access to land and to sustainable economic prosperity.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
African American History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$302,217 (approved)
$302,217 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 5/31/2023

The arrangement and description of the archives of two California women architects/planners, Cathy Simon and Karen Alschuler, of the architectural firm SMWM (Simon Martin-Vegue Winkelstein Moris), whose work impacted California design in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

A grant to preserve and make accessible significant source materials generated by architect Cathy Simon and urban designer Karen Alschuler of the firm SMWM (Simon Martin-Vegue Winkelstein Moris).

Project fields:
Architecture

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$151,586 (approved)
$151,586 (awarded)

Grant period:
1/1/2021 – 8/31/2023

The planning and development of an online directory of libraries, archives, and museums containing sources on Hispanic history and culture in the United States, from the colonial era through 1960, with a focus on small institutions in the South and Southeast.

The University of Houston seeks support for a Foundations-level project to identify and develop institution-level descriptions for small cultural heritage repositories in order to assess their Hispanic/Latino holdings and the conditions in which they are held, and to inform the interested community of the existence of these holdings. The proposed survey will be the basis for creating a guide to these materials and will represent a first step in making them accessible as well as improving the conditions in which they are held. The Survey of Small Historical Societies, Libraries and Museums for Hispanic Materials and Their Management, Phase 2 will constitute an entirely free database accessible through the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage website of the University of Houston.

[White paper]

Project fields:
Hispanic American Studies; Latin American History; Latin American Literature

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$50,000 (approved)
$50,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 8/31/2021

A multi-institutional planning project to develop an online portal for access to archival sources on Franco American history and culture.  The project team would also plan for digitizing Franco American sources at partner institutions and would explore linking other library and archival collections to the portal.

The Franco American Portal Project is a five-university collaboration to build a primary source discovery tool for Franco American collections. Sponsored by the University of Maine and in collaboration with the University of Southern Maine, University of Maine at Fort Kent, Assumption College, and St. Anselm College, this project seeks to create a single, bilingual, culturally conscientious, searchable portal to archival materials concerning the French Canadian diaspora in the United States. Funds will be used to create a portal that links to the five partners' in-scope archival collections; foster teamwork and partner collaboration; support outreach to solicit in-scope materials from other institutions in the United States and Canada; and develop a digitization plan for growing content for the portal.

[White paper][Media coverage]

Project fields:
American Studies; Immigration History; U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$59,994 (approved)
$59,994 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 10/31/2021

Digitization of 73,894 photographs of American and European sculpture and American gallery inventories from the twentieth century. The project would complete online access to the Frick’s 1.2 million reference images.

The Frick Collection proposes a two-year implementation project to digitize and make available 73,894 photographic images of artwork and corresponding documentation. This project targets outliers from the collection that require special format treatment (nitrate negatives, transparencies) or the securing of copyright permissions (gallery photographs, three-dimensional works) and will complete the digital reformatting of the more than 1.2 million images that comprise the Frick’s Photoarchive collection. The Frick is requesting a $350,000 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in order to help succeed with fundraising for this project. The Frick’s focus on creating rich, shareable metadata will help ensure the wide dissemination of this new resource to a global audience. The digitized materials will be made freely available to peer institutions and to the public through the Frick Art Reference Library’s online catalog.

Project fields:
Art History and Criticism

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 12/31/2022

The continued development of the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), with the addition of 1,178 pre-1701 printed ballad sheets from 101 institutions in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In addition, the applicant would catalog 923 tune titles and approximately 18,200 woodcut impressions and would enhance access to the entire ballad collection through the project’s new website, EBBA 4.0.

The University of California at Santa Barbara requests critical funding to launch the vital 8th and final stage of its digital English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) to include the 1,178 extant but as-yet-unarchived pre-1701 English broadside ballads held at 101 institutions across the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. We have reviewed the largest collections on site at 15 institutions and have procured agreements from all to include their 850 items in EBBA. This signals great enthusiasm that we anticipate will extend to the remaining institutions with smaller holdings. Keeping to EBBA standards, we will provide high-quality facsimiles and transcriptions of the ballads, granular cataloging in TEI/XML/MARC (and now MEI), recordings, visual aids, and informative essays. Finally, we will launch our new website, EBBA 4.0, which will enhance user access to ballads as texts, music, and art.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
British Literature

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 5/31/2023

The expansion of the Discography of American Historical Recordings online database through the creation of 14,000 discographic records and the digitization of recordings on 8,500 disc sides produced by the Bluebird and Victor record labels, covering the period from the 1920s to 1948.

The American Discography Project-Victor and Bluebird Records Access Initiative is a project to add discographic data for 14,000 Victor and Bluebird recordings from the 1940s to UC Santa Barbara's Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) as well as digitize 8,500 sides from 1925 through 1948 for free online access under a new agreement from Sony Music, the copyright holder. The project will provide access to an important body of little known works from one of the most fertile eras in American recording history.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
American Studies; Music History and Criticism

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,721 (approved)
$349,721 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 5/31/2023

Digitizing 4,409 volumes of dime novels and story papers published by Street & Smith, a New York City firm in operation from 1855 to 1959.  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 every story, series, and author, to augment an existing online bibliography of dime novels.

The Street & Smith Project seeks to digitize the dime novels and story papers of the only major publisher to survive the dime novel era. In addition to making thousands of these publications freely and 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. This bibliography will be used to aggregate each partner’s digital dime novel holdings, while unpacking the complex relationships that exist between the dime novels themselves.

[Grant products][Media coverage]

Project fields:
American Literature; U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$348,630 (approved)
$348,630 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2020 – 6/30/2023

The cataloging and digitization of 15,030 early color glass slides created by explorers and researchers between 1914 and 1944, covering the Arctic regions, Greenland, and Alaska. An accompanying finding aid would include not only description of the photographs but also some 3,000 textual objects that document the content and the creation of the collection.

The project aims to complete a comprehensive survey, analysis, and digital preservation program of the National Geographic Society’s collection of Autochromes, Dufaycolor, Finlaycolor, and Agfachrome plates from the 1910s-1944, collectively known as the Early Color Collection.

Project fields:
Interdisciplinary Studies, Other

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 5/31/2023

The arrangement and description of nearly 400 linear feet documenting Howard Hughes’ film career dating roughly from the 1920s to the 1970s.

The Tony Stark of his era. That is perhaps the most concise description of Howard Robard Hughes (1905-1976), arguably one of the twentieth century’s most significant visionaries. A transformative figure in aviation, business, and the history of Hollywood, Hughes established strong ties to southern Nevada during the latter half of his life, and donated his company records to the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV). The Howard Hughes Motion Picture Papers span nearly half a century and include an impressive range of heterogeneous and distinctive materials related to the art, technology, economics, and social impact of American cinema. UNLV is proposing a cross-domain Implementation project that will leverage the subject expertise of the Department of Film and the technical expertise of the University Libraries Special Collections and Archives to increase the longevity of the materials and make them known and available to the public.

Project fields:
Arts, Other; Cultural History; Film History and Criticism

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$271,580 (approved)
$271,580 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 8/31/2022

A survey of at-risk 35mm slide collections of the built environment in the United States and abroad created from the 1960s to the mid-1990s held by members and partner institutions of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), along with a pilot project to create a consortium of institutions that would house the digitized and physical collections; develop guidelines for prioritizing digitization, long-term storage and disposal; and create a framework for using fellowships and internships to assist with digitizing the slides and creating finding aids.

This project's first goal is the identification of at-risk 35mm slide collections focused on the built environment. Previous investigation through the SAH has recognized the levels of risk and identified measures to preserve material of high significance.  The second goal is ensuring the documentation, processing, and ultimate widespread sharing of these assets in recognition of their positive impact on the Humanities.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
Architecture; Art History and Criticism; Urban History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$59,982 (approved)
$56,381 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 6/30/2022

Revitalizing the digital architecture of the Walt Whitman Archive to make it easier to search and use the materials on the website.  Specific improvements would include changing the programming framework, creating a machine-readable interface for the website’s code, images, and metadata, revising files to improve the metadata, and leveraging existing metadata through a new search engine.

The Walt Whitman Archive (https://whitmanarchive.org) is one of the most prominent open-access digital archives, with hundreds of thousands of visitors annually, many from secondary and post-secondary schools. Now nearing its 25th year, the Archive is the leading resource for scholars of Whitman and a model for digital editions. Its depth has enabled its success, but has also created an infrastructure that is showing its age. We propose a critical redevelopment of the project's technical framework for both broad access and long-term sustainability, overhauling its information architecture, access framework, and public interface. Such a rebuild will make it easier for users to search, organize, and re-use our materials and to access it from mobile devices, and will allow more flexibility for future development. It will also serve as a model for other major scholarly resources whose digital infrastructure needs preservation, lest past investments of money, time, and energy be lost.

Project fields:
English

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,856 (approved)
$349,856 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 5/31/2023

The digitization of 3,000 audiovisual recordings that chronicle the Seattle Art Museum’s institutional history from the 1930s to the 2010s.

The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) requests a Humanities Collection and Reference Resource Implementation Grant of $350,000 to digitize, preserve, and provide access to at-risk video assets in the museum’s Historic Media Collection, a collection of audio-visual materials of value to those studying art, artists, and architects of national and international importance, as well as those interested in the history of art and culture in the Pacific Northwest that spans the 1930s through today.

Project fields:
Arts, General; Cultural History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
1/1/2021 – 12/31/2023

Expansion and development of an online resource that documents the history, people, and places of Tibet, Inner Asia, and the Himalayan region.  The project would expand the technical infrastructure of the current resource to include linked open data and would expand content by adding new biographies and geographic data.

The Treasury of Lives, an online encyclopedia of Tibet, Inner Asia and the Himalayan Region, will implement a major expansion of encyclopedia content and transition from traditional relational database tables to a Resource Description Framework (RDF) knowledge graph capable of supporting semantic queries. The Treasury of Lives will add 100 new biographies of significant twentieth century Tibetan figures and 100 geographic place description entries with dynamic mapping, as well as related family and social roles content, to the actively growing resource. This content development will coincide with the development of a data model and ontology for people and places of Tibet, all in preparation for the transition to a triple-store database and website redevelopment that will fully implement the principles of Linked Open Data (LOD).

Project fields:
Area Studies; East Asian Studies; Nonwestern Religion

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,475 (approved)
$349,475 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 6/30/2023

Providing access to three archival collections that document Maine’s history from 1625 to 1893 through the Maine Memory Network website. The project would provide more than 21,000 images with metadata, as well as some transcriptions and contextual essays.

The Beyond Borders: Mapping Maine and the American Northeast Boundary, 1625-1893 project seeks to create an engaging online space where scholars, students and the general public can find, access, and explore three collections which relate to Maine’s land use, natural resources, economic distribution and Wabanaki sovereignty. These collections document the settlement and establishment of northern New England, specifically coastal and interior Maine and along the Canadian border. Using our digital history platform Maine Memory Network (www.MaineMemory.net) as a base, we will create a rich historic narrative and online presentation for each collection that puts material in context. From this narrative, visitors can access a finding aid for each collection and dig deeper into fully-digitized content, which will provide an internet user anywhere in the world with the ability to browse each page of the collection in the same fashion as one would approach the collection in person.

Project fields:
U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$341,935 (approved)
$341,935 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 1/31/2023

An online statewide inventory of municipal records documenting urban renewal in New York from 1949 to 1974, to facilitate planning for the digitization of the materials.

Urban renewal was one of the most important—and controversial—domestic policies in our nation’s history. Between 1949 and 1974, the federal government spent over $7 billion to revitalize more than 1,200 cities struggling with economic and population decline. Yet—except for a handful of cities—we know surprisingly little about urban renewal’s history and legacy. This project seeks funding of $52,029 ($46,420 for the core project plus $5,609 for inter-institutional partnerships) at the Foundations level to create a statewide inventory of locally-held urban renewal records for New York State, with the ultimate goal of digitizing selected records. This inventory and eventual digital collection will improve scholarly and public understanding of the lasting impact of urban renewal in our communities.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$52,029 (approved)
$52,029 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 5/31/2022

The arrangement and description of four manuscript collections, totaling 149 linear feet, that document women’s history in the greater Philadelphia region from the 1860s to the present.  Portions of each collection would also receive conservation treatment and be rehoused for long-term preservation.

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania seeks $124,266 for an 18-month project (total project cost: $203,161) to arrange, preserve, and describe four significant, and in-need, manuscript collections (encompassing 149 linear feet of material) that document women’s history, particularly relating to the civic engagement of women through clubs and organizations. By improving access to and preservation of these collections, the project will support research in women’s history and related fields, and further HSP’s goal to ensure that 100 percent of our collections are documented, protected, and made available for study.

Project fields:
U.S. History; Women's History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$124,266 (approved)
$124,266 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2020 – 12/31/2022

Planning for the creation of online access to Native American language holdings at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, at the University of Oklahoma.  Planning would entail a series of workshops for tribal community members, linguists, archivists, and technology developers in order to share user needs and best practices in the design of language repositories.

The Native American Languages collection at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma is seeking funding for a collaborative project to plan the development of an online platform for the collection. The website will provide unprecedented access to the collection by allowing users to view and download materials directly, rather than the current system which requires people to visit the collection in person. This type of access fulfills our mission to make those materials that are meant to be shared as available as possible to Native peoples, researchers, and the greater public. We propose to hold a series of workshops designed to get input from NAL stakeholders (Native communities, linguists, educators), archiving professionals, and developers to create a user-oriented interface that will best serve the needs of our community of users. Information gathered from the workshops will be used to produce detailed mock-ups of the site.

[White paper]

Project fields:
Linguistics; Native American Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$49,495 (approved)
$49,495 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 5/31/2021

The arrangement, description, cataloging, and selected digitization of 170 cubic feet of archival materials and 260 objects from the William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Collection, including correspondence, photographs, model planes, invention prototypes, and 33 audio recordings and 18 films related to groundbreaking discoveries in aviation and radio that span the twentieth century.

The Museum of Flight's project to arrange and describe the papers of William P. and Moya Olsen Lear will create accessibility to this collection documenting the business ventures of one of the U.S.’s most prolific inventors. 170 cubic feet of archival material spanning the 1920s-1995 will be arranged and described, culminating in the creation of a new publicly accessible finding aid. Approximately 5,000 scans of unique items in the collection, including correspondence, photographs, patent documents, and other business materials will be made available online. In addition, approximately 260 artifacts such as model planes and invention prototypes will be cataloged and photographed and 33 audio recordings and 18 films will be preserved and digitized. The collection will serve as a unique scholarly resource that illustrates ventures in not only aviation history but navigation, radio, motors, and more.

Project fields:
History of Science

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$236,824 (approved)
$236,824 (awarded)

Grant period:
9/1/2020 – 8/31/2022

The digitization, transcription, and annotation of the papers of Mississippi state governors from 1859 to 1882 to include official correspondence, military telegrams, and letters and petitions from the public.

The Civil War Governors of Mississippi Digital Documentary Edition (CWGM) is an open-access collection of nearly 50,000 documents from the state’s governors’ papers from the late 1850s through the early 1880s that will be scanned, transcribed, and annotated over the next six years. CWGM is seeking a three-year NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant to fund the first three-years of this project. Mississippi's Civil War-era governors' records capture the everyday experiences of southerners from the period just before the American Civil War through the end of Reconstruction and into the New South. The project involves a cross-domain partnership between archivists at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, digital archives specialists at the Mississippi Digital Library, and a historian-led research team at the University of Southern Mississippi.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
American Government; Military History; U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,987 (approved)
$345,258 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 5/31/2023

The enhancement of a database that details the lives of 4,000 enslaved and formerly enslaved African Americans in Virginia who took part in the colonization and establishment of Liberia in the nineteenth century and provides data pertaining to 500 facilitators of their emigration.  The database would include links to digitized correspondence and other contextual and bibliographic information.

This project will enable online access to information about 4,000 African Americans, enslaved and free, who emigrated from Virginia to Liberia between 1820 and 1866, and about 500 former enslavers and/or facilitated their migration. Our recent scholarship provides an authoritative basis for the substantial demographic information that is rare for African Americans in this period—including enslaved people’s surnames, ages, and relationships. Most significantly, over 400 letters by and about the emigrants, written before and after their emigration, will be linked to the records for emigrants and their former enslavers/facilitators, with sophisticated online access to these letters (mostly American Colonization Society records archived by Library of Congress). Virginia Emigrants to Liberia will inform scholars, researchers and students in a variety of disciplines, as well as the general public, with regard to life, liberty, race and citizenship on both sides of the Atlantic.

Project fields:
African American History; African American Studies; U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$126,527 (approved)
$126,527 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 5/31/2023

Development of an online dictionary of Missouri artists, profiling 500 artists who were active across the state between 1821 and 1951. The resource would be developed through a partnership among three leading archival repositories in Missouri and would debut in the state’s bicentennial year.

In commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the State of Missouri, The Spencer Art Reference Library of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in partnership with the Jannes Library of the Kansas City Art Institute and The Saint Louis Public Library will make descriptive information on Missouri artists discoverable online by launching the publicly accessible digital portal, "Missouri Remembers: Artists in Missouri 1821 – 1951." The online resource will enable users to explore iconic artists like Thomas Hart Benton and George Caleb Bingham and to discover lesser known artists, such as female artists and artists of color, who lived in or spent part of their careers within the State of Missouri from the state’s beginning in 1821 through 1951. To implement this initiative, project partners will mine their large collection of files on Missouri artists to create individual descriptive records on an initial 500 artists for the portal's launch.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
Art History and Criticism

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$157,653 (approved)
$157,653 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 5/31/2022

Transcription of the Green-Wood Cemetery’s historical burial registry, which contains records from 1840 to 1937 of 438,180 citizens interred in the cemetery. The registry’s contents would be transformed into a database searchable through the cemetery’s website and available for full download.

Green-Wood Historic Fund respectfully requests a $144,940 grant to make available Green-Wood Cemetery's burial registry which spans the time period 1840-1937. The burial registry notes the nativity, street address, age in years, months and days, cause of death, date of death, date of interment and the name of the undertaker of 438,180 individuals - a true sampling of New York's population. Included in this undertaking is the transcription of every burial record in the registry and the development of an Elasticsearch index (described more completely in Steps 2 and 3 of Methodology and Standards below) that will enable the burial record data to be placed on Green-Wood’s website and made discoverable and searchable to experienced researchers and the general public for the first time. Perhaps the most enticing aspect of the project is that it is merely the tip of the iceberg for a vast and almost completely unknown storehouse of similar burial records held by cemeteries around the country.

Project fields:
History, General; Social Sciences, General

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$144,940 (approved)
$144,940 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 7/31/2022

Cataloging and digitization of 25,000 slides taken by photographer Florence Arquin during the 1940s and 1950s that document Latin American and Caribbean heritage and culture, to be made available through a website at Florida Atlantic University.

The Arquin Slide Collection Digitization Project will digitize Florence Arquin’s collection of 25,000 slides, create descriptive metadata, archive the images and metadata, and make the collection accessible in a digital collection through a public website created with Omeka S. Online access to the collection will serve as a powerful research tool for scholars throughout the world who study Latin America and the Caribbean.

Project fields:
Latin American Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$231,588 (approved)
$229,243 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 5/31/2023

The arrangement, description, and selected digitization of archival collections pertaining to the role of religion in Latino history.  Included are nine collections totaling 237 linear feet, among which are 12,000 photographs that would be digitized.

While there has been significant and substantial work done in the general area of Mexican American social history, the role of religion, spirituality, and faith have received limited attention until recently. Researchers have documented the sociological fact of religion as a significant factor among U.S. Latinos (with 91% identifying with a religion or faith). But scholars also note a “surprising” absence of humanities research that integrates this material into archive-based research and educational curricula. This project proposes to reframe the approach to and use of archival resources informing social histories, educational practices, and public programming related to the Mexican American population.

Project fields:
Latin American History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,289 (approved)
$329,936 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2020 – 6/30/2023

The digitization of nearly 6,000 hours of radio and television programs documenting the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community in Houston from the mid-1970s to the 2000s.

The Gulf Coast LGBT Radio and Television Digitization and Access Project proposes to digitize, transcribe, describe, and make available over thirty years of unique radio and television broadcast recordings created by and for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans communities. Drawing from UH Special Collections, and through a partnership with the Gulf Coast Archive and Museum of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender History, Inc., four series have been identified for inclusion in this project, totaling thousands of hours of content not heard or seen since initial broadcast. Currently, these materials are inaccessible to researchers, and due to the fragile audiovisual formats, are at significant risk of loss due to deterioration. These recordings are primary documents chronicling the experience of the LGBT community in a major Southern city and stand as a testament to the role of radio and television broadcast in the LGBT movement’s pursuit for social acceptance and political equality.

Project fields:
History, Other

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$348,751 (approved)
$333,251 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 5/31/2023

Arrangement and description of 282 linear feet of archival material, including correspondence, memos, photographs, audiovisual recordings, and ephemera related to the career of James M. Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1986 for his development of Public Choice Theory.

The James M. Buchanan Papers chronicle the legacy of James M. Buchanan (1919-2013) – economist, Nobel Prize recipient, and National Humanities Medal awardee – whose theories had far-reaching influence on America’s national life. In addition to Buchanan’s extensive scholarship, the collection contains correspondence, memos, publications, photographs, and other ephemera related to his life and academic career. Spanning 282 linear feet, the collection is the largest and most significant holding in existence of unique, primary source material related to Dr. Buchanan. To effectively respond to numerous research inquiries from around the world and to make the archival materials accessible, it is essential that the manuscript collection be fully processed by professional archivists to provide arrangement and description based on archival best practices. A completely processed collection will ensure consistent access for all scholars interested in examining Buchanan’s influence.

Project fields:
American Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$334,720 (approved)
$334,720 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 5/31/2023

A planning and pilot project to establish priorities for digitizing the Stowe Center’s archival holdings and artifact collections related to Harriet Beecher Stowe, her family, and the Nook Farm neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut.  The project would seek advice from focus groups of scholars, teachers, and students; digitize and create metadata for 100 objects; develop and test workflows; and collaborate with state-wide digital platforms to ensure the collections reach a wide audience.

The collection at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center is made up of more than 13,000 published works, 195,000 manuscripts, 12,000 images, 5,000 graphic materials, and 8,500 artifacts which illustrate illustrate important themes in 19th-century U.S. history and can be studied across several disciplines.  The digitization project grew out of the Stowe Center’s desire to meet the expectations of today’s researchers for access to digital resources, update content and metadata to reflect contemporary standards, and bridge collections to programmatic needs more fully realizing our mission. This project comes at the right time for the museum – having successfully completed an NEH-funded interior renovation and reinterpretation of the Stowe House in 2017, the Stowe Center is poised with new leadership to undertake planning for collections digitization as an institutional priority.

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Project fields:
African American History; U.S. History; Women's History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$50,000 (approved)
$50,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 10/31/2021

A project to evaluate transcription tools and methods and develop a preservation plan for two sociolinguistic corpora documenting contemporary language practices of Spanish/English bilingual speakers in South Texas and southern Arizona.

Linguists at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) and the University of Arizona (UA) have collected over 157 hours of audio-recorded interviews with Spanish/English bilinguals documenting language varieties along the U.S./Mexico border. However, due to the time-consuming nature of manual transcription, many of these interviews have not yet been transcribed, limiting access to this valuable collection. This project pilots technologically-enhanced transcription methodologies, such as speech recognition and time alignment, to speed and streamline the transcription process. It also pilots a sustainable, community-based approach to the transcription of interviews by undergraduate and graduate students in research internship courses. This assessment, outcomes and findings of this project will guide other scholars seeking to develop their own community-based sociolinguistic corpora.

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Project fields:
Linguistics

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$59,975 (approved)
$59,975 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 8/31/2021

Digitization and description of 854 original audio recordings of humanities and literary lectures given at the 92nd Street Y in New York City from 1950 to 2008.

92Y is requesting funds for the digital preservation of and increased public access to 854 tape-based audio recordings in our Humanities archive. Dating from 1956, the Humanities Audio Archive captures and features lectures, conversations, debates, and panel discussions across the fields of language arts, fine arts, performing arts, cinema, philosophy, history, and Jewish studies, as well as jurisprudence, anthropology, sociology, psychology, media studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. These recordings provide a truly distinguished record of public discourse on the questions and issues that helped define the second half of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first century in America, and feature some of the period’s most influential figures. For this stage of its large-scale media preservation efforts, 92Y is focusing on the digital preservation of its audio recordings contained on imperiled, increasingly vulnerable analog and digital tape-based formats.

Project fields:
Arts, General; Interdisciplinary Studies, General; Jewish Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2020 – 8/31/2023

Preservation, digitization, cataloging, and creation of online access to 540 hours of the song, dance, and oratory of Sealaska Heritage Institute’s biennial festivals, from their start in 1982 to the present.

Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI) is perhaps best known throughout Alaska and the “Lower 48” (the contiguous United States) for its biennial Celebration, a major dance-and-culture festival that celebrates the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian cultures of Southeast Alaska and other Native groups that join in the event. SHI designed its three-year Celebration: 10,000 Years of Cultural Survival project to edit its digitized recordings of Celebrations 1982-1988; migrate, preserve, and edit its recordings of Celebrations 1990-2016; and create online access to 540 edited hours of songs, dances, and oratory from Celebrations 1982-2018 on two platforms: YouTube and Proficio for the Web. This video will be presented by dance group and will also be searchable by performance, community, Celebration year, and when possible, by specific speakers. SHI will also create two short educational videos about Celebration which will complement the project.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
Interdisciplinary Studies, General

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,964 (approved)
$349,964 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 5/31/2023

The cataloging and digitization of 30,000 paper squeezes that preserve ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions, including treaties, laws, decrees, honorific inscriptions, accounts of building projects, dedications, and literary texts from Ancient Greece.

The Institute for Advanced Study seeks support to complete its project to digitize the Institute’s collection of approximately 30,000 paper squeezes of Greek inscriptions, the second largest such collection in the world. The squeezes, which are three-dimensional, mirror image impressions of inscriptions, were created and donated to the Institute by the Epigraphical Museum in Athens, the American excavation of the ancient Athenian agora, and some of the greatest epigraphers of the twentieth century. Squeezes often preserve inscriptions which have been destroyed or lost, and they increase accessibility since the original stones are often heavy and located in out-of-the-way museum storerooms. The digitization of the squeezes and the addition of metadata will preserve these delicate prized resources; make them accessible online for free and unlimited use by researchers, teachers, and students worldwide; and enhance the study of primary sources for every aspect of Classical culture.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
Ancient History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 5/31/2023

The planning and development of an online database that would aggregate information on the historic buildings and monuments of Sicily’s Norman period, dating from 1061 to 1194.  This pilot phase would focus on the 147 monasteries that are known to have been built in this period.  The resource would disseminate three types of information: historical and site-specific data for all of the monasteries, photographic and video documentation of the 52 that survive, and any related genealogical data.

The Norman Sicily Project (NSP) digitally registers, maps and analyzes the monuments erected during the island's Norman period (ca. 1061-1194), arguably the most auspicious years in its long history. In so doing, it provides new understandings of the complex society that produced them. The project accomplishes this by joining history and earth science in a collaboration made broadly accessible by digital technologies. This application is in support of a pilot project to ensure that the best technological foundation is in place for the NSP's future development. The primary grant product will be a prototype offering access to an entire class of monuments - the society's monasteries - including images, geographic location, onomastic information, chronological data, types of attestation, gender, order, administrative rank, mother houses, dependencies, founders, dates of field visits, seismic region information and sustainability data. These data will be made freely available to the public.

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Project fields:
Cultural History; Interdisciplinary Studies, Other; Medieval History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$49,783 (approved)
$49,721 (awarded)

Grant period:
9/1/2019 – 8/31/2021

A collaborative planning project to develop a database documenting the lives of members of the Scottish clergy from 1560 to 1689, based on manuscripts held at the National Records of Scotland.

A digital prosopography that traces the careers of two centuries of Scottish clerics, Mapping the Scottish Reformation (MSR) will be one of the largest databases of Protestant thinkers, theologians, and preachers in the world. Built with data from manuscripts held at the National Records of Scotland (NRS), this is the first project to ever comprehensively chart the growth, movement, and networks of the Scottish clergy between 1560 and 1689. For scholars and students of this era, such a resource will provide crucial framing for inquiries into religious beliefs, political conflicts, and institutional change. For those interested in family history on both sides of the Atlantic, MSR will provide unprecedented information on individuals whose outsized archival footprints make them critical figures for genealogical research. We are requesting an NEH HCRR Foundations Grant to support the essential pilot phase of this multi-stage project.

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Project fields:
British History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$49,959 (approved)
$49,959 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 12/31/2020

The development of a web-based historical atlas containing thousands of documents pertaining to Native land transactions that involve the Miami Tribe from the late-eighteenth to early-twentieth century.  The documents represent transactions in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

The proposed project, titled Aacimwahkionkonci ‘Land of Stories,’ will synthesize primary resource materials and years of historical research on Miami Tribe land transactions into an interactive historical atlas, following resettlement patterns through three states where the Miami Nation has resided over time. As a web-based GIS and historical educational resource, the Aacimwahkionkonci Project will allow users to examine and interpret thousands of historical records, documenting how real estate left Miami Tribe ownership through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a educational tool, the Aacimwahkionkonci Project will provide tribal members, the general public, and current landowners access to this rich history and re-establish the connection between people, places and the narratives that define their interactions over time.

Project fields:
History, General; Native American Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$180,450 (approved)
$177,007 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 4/30/2022

The processing and digitization of 15 linear feet of personal papers of John W. Rhoden, an African American sculptor who was active in the New York Abstract and Figurative Expressionism movements. Activities will include arrangement, description, rehousing, and cataloging of photographs, sketchbooks, drawings, correspondence, and materials related to Rhoden’s exhibitions, awards, travels, and commissions. Up to 5,000 items will be digitized and hosted on the website of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

A project to process, catalog, rehouse, digitize and provide online access to the papers of John W. Rhoden (1918-2001), a highly talented but under-recognized 20th century African American artist. The project will help ensure the collection is properly preserved for posterity and, at the same time, dramatically improve discovery, access, and use of the unique materials. The papers are not only a scholarly resource for the study of Rhoden’s personal and professional life, but also serve as a visual resource for American modernist sculpture by an African American artist.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
Art History and Criticism

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$75,000 (approved)
$75,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 10/31/2021

The cataloging and digitization of the Alden Scott Boyer collection of nineteenth century photography. This collection is a formative part of the George Eastman Museum’s photography collection, containing more than 10,000 individual photographic objects and 3,000 books, periodicals, and manuals related to photography.

George Eastman Museum will catalog, digitize and provide broad access to the Boyer collection of photography, a formative part of the museum’s photography collection. Over 10,000 objects will be cataloged and at least 29,600 digital image files will be created. The Boyer Collection is one of the most significant public collections in the U.S. for the study of nineteenth-century life, history, and culture and one of the largest and most diverse gatherings of nineteenth century British photography outside of the U.K. It is also one of the most important museum collections of vernacular photography in the U.S. Scholars, researchers and the public will benefit from online and physical access to these important materials. It is anticipated that new connections will be drawn that will illuminate a variety of humanities research topics. The project will commence in May 1, 2019 and will be completed by April 30, 2022.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
Arts, General; History, General

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 4/30/2023

Expansion of the Historical Index of the Medieval Middle East (MIMME), a reference resource identifying primary historical sources on medieval Middle Eastern history (600-1500 CE), containing up to 50,000 entries about medieval Middle Eastern people, places, events, and cultural practices.

The Historical Index of the Medieval Middle East (HIMME) will expand our understanding of a critical period of human history. The medieval Middle East (600-1500) continues to be significant for current events, yet public understanding and scholarly arguments about this history have been limited by the difficulty of accessing all the relevant primary sources in their various languages. HIMME will make diversity and commonality visible by providing an index to an extensible collection of primary sources in the full range of medieval Middle Eastern languages, noting where translations are available. An expressive temporal model will enable scholars to refine queries based on transmission. Freely available online and indexed by search engines, HIMME will document for scholarly and public audiences the unexpected linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity of a region which is popularly conceptualized as linguistically, ethnically, and religiously monolithic (Arabic, Arab, and Islamic).

[Grant products]

Project fields:
Medieval History; Near and Middle Eastern History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$212,767 (approved)
$212,767 (awarded)

Grant period:
8/1/2019 – 11/30/2021

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.

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Project fields:
Ethnic Studies; Hispanic American Studies; History, Criticism, and Theory of the Arts

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$60,000 (approved)
$60,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 4/30/2021

Production of a comprehensive, searchable, and open-access version online of the works of Piranesi. Work would include preservation, scanning, custom page-level metadata creation, translation, digital collections management, web design, exhibit curation, and public events planning.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an innovative graphic artist most known for his architectural studies of Rome and imaginary prisons. “The Digital Piranesi” aims to make this rare material accessible in a complete digital collection and, in an interactive digital edition, to make it visible, legible, and searchable in ways that the original works are not. The scale and breadth of Piranesi’s works require innovative methods of presentation, discovery, and analysis. By digitally illuminating and enacting many of the graphic features of his designs, this project will provide new ways of seeing this unique historical material.

Project fields:
Art History and Criticism; Classical History; European History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$339,684 (approved)
$339,684 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 3/31/2023

The creation of an online collection of over 65,000 handwritten survey responses containing the personal comments of American soldiers in WWII. The narrative responses would be transcribed and reunited with quantitative data from the respondents; contextual information would be added to facilitate access by multiple user groups.

Our project will make available to scholars and to the public a remarkable collection of written reflections on war and military service by American soldiers who fought in the Second World War. During the conflict, an in-house Army Research Branch surveyed approximately half a million service personnel. Survey respondents were asked about myriad topics, from the effectiveness of training to the preference of fabrics used in uniforms. Service personnel were also provided space to write frankly about any of their concerns. Until now, only by visiting Washington, D.C., could one read these 65,000-plus anonymous "free-text" commentaries. Taken together, these wartime records provide us the most comprehensive portrait of the largest citizen-soldier Army in US history. Our interdisciplinary team will reunite these one-of-a-kind free-text commentaries to their source surveys and make the entire reconstituted collection available to the public through an open-access website.

[Grant products][Media coverage]

Project fields:
Military History; U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,864 (approved)
$346,268 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 7/31/2021

Digitization of 1926 United States Census of Religious Bodies schedules, creation of a spatial dataset, selective and crowdsourced transcription, and creation of maps and visualizations using the records.

This project will transform the 1926 U.S. Census of Religious Bodies, which has individual schedules for 232,154 congregations, into a spatial dataset. That collection is the only federal census with extant schedules, but it is unusable by researchers because it is not digitized, searchable, or transcribed. We will digitize the schedules, make those records freely searchable and browsable online, create an Omeka module to transcribe them into a dataset, transcribe a representative selection and open the remainder to crowdsourcing, and create maps and visualizations that contextualize the records. The result will be the single most detailed and comprehensive spatial dataset for American religion, useable by scholars in history and religious studies, by local historians, and by the public.

[Grant products][Media coverage]

Project fields:
History, General

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,971 (approved)
$349,944 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 4/30/2023

Planning for a digital archive documenting conservation and preservation work over the last 25 years at 85 historic Egyptian sites dating as early as the sixth millennium BCE, including the creation of collection management policies and manuals. The project would also support pilot work to digitize and make available archival reports, photographs, and born-digital materials for three sites: Shunet al Zebib, a third-millennium BCE mudbrick funerary complex at Abydos in Upper Egypt; the Red Monastery, a fifth-century Coptic monastery near Souhag in Upper Egypt; and the Mosque of Aslam al-Silahdar, a fourteenth-century mosque in the center of Cairo.

Covering the full breadth of 7,000 years of Egyptian history, ARCE stewards a singular archive documenting 85 projects with a concentration of materials on lost or inaccessible sites throughout Egypt. ARCE bears a responsibility to preserve this archive and share its contents. With a two-year Foundations grant, we will create and approve critical collections management policies and manuals and publish a pilot digital archive of three collections. Embedded in the planning and pilot phases are points for testing, feedback and adjustment, with guidance from a multidisciplinary advisory board and input from public audiences and other stakeholders. Publication of ARCE's materials will allow free access for educators, students and the American and Egyptian public to a wide range of digitized resources. Integrated with ARCE's website, the conservation archive will contribute to more comprehensive public understanding of cultural heritage sites in Egypt.

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Project fields:
Interdisciplinary Studies, Other

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$50,000 (approved)
$50,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 4/30/2021

Transcription and editing of 185 digitized oral history interviews of Vietnam veterans from all four branches of the service, civilian volunteers during Vietnam, and family members of veterans, and publication of word-searchable transcriptions to the Virtual Vietnam Archive. 

Funding to produce full, word-searchable transcripts for 185 oral history interviews (comprising approximately 725 hours of audio), which encompasses the Vietnam Center & Archive's (VNCA) entire oral history backlog. The transcripts will greatly enhance the discoverability and access to these interviews, which will give the public a greater understanding of the Vietnam War and the Vietnam generation. These interviews provide invaluable information about the individual experiences of the men and women who served in the war to include combat and non-combat veterans, service in all four of the major military branches, and experiences of life on the home front. Once completed, the transcripts will be made freely available in the Virtual Vietnam Archive, an online portal to the considerable digital holdings of the VNCA.

[Media coverage]

Project fields:
Military History; Political History; U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$95,740 (approved)
$95,740 (awarded)

Grant period:
9/1/2019 – 12/31/2022

Digitization of 35,000 cuneiform artifacts dating from the fourth millennium BCE to the first centuries CE, for online access via Yale digital collections portals and the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative.

The project will create and disseminate comprehensive documentation for educational purposes and for research communities focused on deciphering the textual record of Mesopotamia and producing scholarship on the ancient Near East

[Grant products]

Project fields:
Near and Middle Eastern History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$341,924 (approved)
$341,924 (awarded)

Grant period:
9/1/2019 – 8/31/2022

The digitization of 106 hours of raw videotape footage of 182 interviews created in the production of Eyes on the Prize II, the second half of the seminal documentary series that chronicles the civil rights movement from 1965 to 1985.

The Eyes on the Prize II Interview Digitization and Dissemination Project will provide public access for the first time to 182 original complete interviews from the production of Eyes on the Prize: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965-1985.This landmark PBS series tells the complex history of civil rights in the United States in its later years, including the rise of Black nationalism, Northern white resistance to civil rights, and the blossoming of Black Pride. The interviews constitute over 106 hours of previously unavailable footage featuring prominent leaders and unsung grassroots activists. During the two-year project, an outside vendor will create digital video and audio files and initial metadata, and Washington University staff will reassemble the interviews, enhance metadata and create biographies, while a vendor will complete fully-searchable interview transcripts. We will provide online public access to the metadata, transcripts and streaming files of all interviews.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
Film History and Criticism; Media Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$226,392 (approved)
$226,392 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2019 – 8/31/2022

The arrangement and description of 175 linear feet of correspondence, photographs, moving images, records, drawings, and promotional materials related to Kennywood Park, one of the nation’s longest-running amusement parks, along with the digitization of 2,000 images, 12 videos, and 750 pages.

The Heinz History Center is seeking funding for an implementation grant that will support processing and digitization of the Kennywood Park Records. The records offer researchers opportunities to explore an array of humanities topics, including cultural assimilation, popular culture, and leisure. The records amount to 175 linear feet and includes managerial correspondence, photographs, moving images, and promotional material.  The first year of the 18-month project will entail processing the collection, which will result in the records being rehoused, cataloged, and described in a detailed finding aid. The final six months will encompass the digitization of 750 manuscript pages, 2000 images, and 12 videos.  This content will be posted to Historic Pittsburgh, a regional digital library website. Dissemination efforts will include sharing bibliographic information in local and national resources, the creation of K-12 resources, blog posts, and conference presentations.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
Cultural History; U.S. History; Urban History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$87,598 (approved)
$87,598 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 10/31/2021

An implementation project to identify, catalog, and photograph 350-500 composite objects containing organic materials, such as bone, horn, ivory, shells, skins, and quill. These objects represent a subset of Winterthur collections, which include nearly 90,000 fine and decorative art objects made or used in America between 1640 and 1860.

The Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library seeks a grant of $268,172 to catalogue its collection of “overlooked organic” objects through physical identification and research. These artifacts, crafted from hard matrices and collagen-based organics like horn, ivories, bone, and skins by artists whose craft traditions are culturally, historically, and artistically important. This project focuses on cataloguing a prioritized group of organic objects with accuracy that meets Winterthur’s high standards, acquiring information through visual analysis, research, scientific analysis, and expert consultation. We will create a position for one full-time cataloguing assistant for two years to help Winterthur’s curatorial and conservation staff identify and continue to make the organics collection publicly accessible online. The cataloguing assistant and staff will research, analyze, and fully record materials and culturally significant information for at least 350 objects, and as many as 500 objects.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
Arts, General; History, General; Interdisciplinary Studies, General

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$268,172 (approved)
$268,172 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 6/30/2022

The production of an online resource on the history of eugenics in the United States, containing a privacy-protected data set on approximately 30,000 individuals who experienced involuntary sterilization, along with contextual features such as data visualizations, story lines, and thematic pathways.

We seek support for an implementation phase of a digital project piloted with a NEH HCRR Foundations grant. Eugenic Rubicon: Sterilization Stories in America will make the history of eugenics and sterilization in America accessible to a wide range of users. With an integrated collection of historical records and media assets related to the histories of involuntary sterilization in California and new materials covering North Carolina and Iowa, our hybrid collection will feature data visualizations, framing content, and digital storytelling. It will draw from an extensive dataset of over 30,000 sterilization records (approximately one-half of all known sterilizations in the 20th century U.S.) entered into a HIPAA-protected data capture system. Eugenic Rubicon is a team-based project that includes faculty, graduate students, and digital specialists, and will be developed in consultation with community stakeholders. We seek funding for two years, with an anticipated fall 2021 launch.

Project fields:
History of Science

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2019 – 6/30/2023

Digitizing, cataloging, and transcribing 650 audio and visual recordings of women activists involved in peace and social justice movements dating from the 1930s to the late-twentieth century.

The audio, film, and video recordings to be digitized under the “Digitizing the Sound and Sight of American Women’s Work for Peace and Justice” will bring to the public the voices and images of women in the twentieth century who worked for social justice and a peaceful world. While women have always been a significant force in the grass roots, citizen-led, volunteer movements opposed to war, primary resources in the form of twentieth century audio and visual recordings, documenting that participation, have not been as easily or readily available for research. This grant project would allow the Swarthmore College Peace Collection (SCPC) to digitize these recordings, provide the necessary metadata for on line access, and allow access to the recordings themselves to scholars and the general public around the world.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
Cultural History; U.S. History; Women's History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$325,624 (approved)
$325,624 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 4/30/2023

The digitization of 30 linear feet of archives and manuscripts pertaining to the woman suffrage movement held by member repositories of the Philadelphia Area Consortium for Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) and other institutions in the region.

The core of our work will be digitizing and describing manuscript and some printed materials documenting women working for their own and for others’ rights in the century leading up to the woman suffrage vote in 1920, held in area institutions, irrespective of the geographic focus of the collection itself. The digitized material will be served up through a robust web presence that provides access to well-described digital items; the capacity to manipulate the descriptive data to generate new scholarly products; and other resources that will serve students and scholars studying not only women’s work leading up to the 1920 vote for woman suffrage but countless other topics as well. A two-year implementation grant, beginning in 2019, will ensure that a significant portion of the material will be digitized and online prior to the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment, with collection-level records calling out those collections still to be digitized.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
U.S. History; Women's History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$347,525 (approved)
$347,525 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 11/30/2021

A structural redesign of the Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive, with the addition of more works by Chesnutt.  The online reference resource would include all of Chesnutt’s published fiction and nonfiction, a manuscript section with hand-corrected galleys of four major works, including his first and second novels and his biography of Frederick Douglass, and a collection of 300 contemporary reviews of six book-length works Chesnutt published between 1899 and 1905.

Writing as Reconstruction failed, Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932) chronicled the relationships that zigzag across America’s color line. His fiction is widely taught and studied, but important works are hard to find and little attention has been given to his manuscripts. We seek an HCRR Implementation grant to transform and expand the HTML Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive into a standards-based, extensible digital archive with (1) all published works; (2) a manuscript wing with an initial collection of hand-corrected galleys held by the Cleveland Public Library, (3) contemporary reviews, and (4) the infrastructure for an archive that will grow to include three thousand manuscript pages, correspondence, and photographs. Chesnutt’s work cries out for collection: we do not have robust archives for pre-Harlem Renaissance African American writers other than Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, and students and scholars are eager to probe in new ways one of the nation’s finest writers.

Project fields:
African American Studies; American Literature

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$292,627 (approved)
$292,627 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 6/30/2021

The preservation and availability of the papers of American author Eudora Welty (1909-2001), including conservation treatment of 60 items; digitization of selected manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and sound recordings; and the creation of catalog records to facilitate discovery of the materials.

In the proposed project staff will: ensure the long-term preservation of the Eudora Welty Collection by performing necessary in-house measures and by sending sixty pieces for treatment by a professional conservator; digitize, inspect, and compile metadata for over 13,200 selected pieces (approx. 19,800 scans); and prepare electronic records descriptions for accessing the Welty Collection, three complementary collections, and nine (9) sound recordings from the Department’s Audiovisual Collection, thus creating a digital repository of Welty materials available to scholars, teachers and other researchers throughout the world.

Project fields:
Literature, General

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$217,982 (approved)
$217,982 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 9/30/2022

Continued development of the multi-volume reference work, The History of Cartography, leading to publication of Volume Four on the European Enlightenment, 1650-1800, and completion of research, editing, fact-checking, and procurement of illustrations for Volume Five on The Nineteenth Century.

We request an implementation grant for July 2019–June 2021 to advance the final volume of a major reference series, The History of Cartography, and to finalize its penultimate volume. Work planned includes research and extensive preparation of Vol. 5 (for press submission August 2021) and outreach to scholars and the public with Vol. 4’s publication in late 2019. 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 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.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
Cultural History; Interdisciplinary Studies, General

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals (outright + matching):
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2019 – 6/30/2021

Development of an online version of the first (1755) and fourth (1773) editions of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, with robust search and display features for researchers in the humanities.

We seek to create an online edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language with search functionality comparable to other modern, scholarly dictionaries. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Johnson’s Dictionary was the world’s most influential English-language dictionary. It was relied upon not just by noted literary authors, but also by the authors of America’s founding documents. Many researchers still use it to determine the meanings of words from this period; it is regularly cited by the U.S. Supreme Court. Although attempts have been made to digitize the Dictionary, these are now obsolete, inaccurate, or incomplete. This project will fill that gap in three stages: first, create a searchable 1755 edition; second, create a searchable 1773 edition; third, enhance the coding in both editions. Our goal is to make Johnson’s text easy to use and to study, providing significant, long-term benefit to researchers, educators, students, and Johnson enthusiasts.

Project fields:
English

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,521 (approved)
$349,521 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 4/30/2023

The production of finding aids, disk images, and collection-level bibliographic records for the Walter Hood Collection, comprising 20 cartons of manuscript materials, 14 architectural project models, 250 compact disks (CDs), seven zip drives, and four oversize drawers housing project drawings.

The Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Environmental Design Archives at the University of California at Berkeley seek funding to preserve and make accessible significant source materials generated by urban designer Walter Hood (records 1995-2014). The field of urban design encompasses architecture, landscape architecture, and city and regional planning, and is concerned with the shaping of populated spaces. Disciplines like the Humanities, are only now beginning to understand and recognize Urban Design's approach to the built environment and its value and impact on society. While archival repositories have long been collecting architect’s records and more recently landscape architects records, there are few archival collections of significance in this emerging area of urban design.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
Architecture

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$95,203 (approved)
$95,195 (awarded)

Grant period:
8/1/2019 – 3/31/2021

Upgrades to the Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO) database, which contains approximately 13,000 finding aids from cultural heritage institutions large and small across the state.  Improvements to the TARO portal include updating the web site interface, upgrading the underlying infrastructure, and working towards standardizing descriptive metadata such as geographic names and subject headings.

The Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO) consortium, based at The University of Texas at Austin Libraries, seeks $348,359 in funding (with matching funds of $317,457) to address our researchers’ need for improved access to TARO’s holdings. TARO is a free platform for searching finding aids for primary source documents preserved by repositories across Texas. While the site is widely known by researchers and receives millions of page views per year, its appearance and underlying infrastructure have remained static since its debut. The three-year collaborative project will implement improvements to the site’s appearance and functionality; test encoding standards updated to next-generation EAD3; work towards standardizing existing geographic names and subject headings; and provide training to TARO members. NEH grant funds will support salaries and benefits for an applications developer and metadata librarian, as well as improvements to the site’s design.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
U.S. History; U.S. Regional Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$348,359 (approved)
$348,359 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 5/31/2022

A planning and pilot project to assess and digitize selectively the papers of Eugene B. Redmond, Poet Laureate of East St. Louis, Illinois, and Professor Emeritus of Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville (SIUE), reflecting his participation in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.  Donated to SIUE in 2007, the collection comprises approximately 325 cubic feet of material, including manuscripts, correspondence with nationally prominent writers and artists, flyers, printed materials, and photographs.

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville's Library and Information Services requests funding to plan and form a pilot project of the Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection. The EBR Digital Collection will be an invaluable resource for scholars studying the Black Arts Movement as it comprises an extensive record of images, flyers, programs, recordings, and artifacts documenting the literary activity of hundreds of African American literary and cultural figures from the mid-1960s to the present. The project team will develop a plan, to be tested via a pilot project, for the creation of the EBR Digital Collection. The outputs for this planning period will include documents detailing selection criteria, rights management, standardization of metadata, digitization, and quality control. The pilot phase of the project will involve the digitization of a small selection of materials from the EBR Collection to allow the project team to test and revise their plans for the rest of the Collection.

Project fields:
Arts, Other

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$48,664 (approved)
$48,664 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 4/30/2023

The production of 300 entries and 75 annotated guides for K-12 educators to be added to the online Colorado Encyclopedia, providing authoritative information on the state's history and culture, with new content emphasizing the history of political and civic engagement in the state.

This project is an expansion and enhancement of Colorado Encyclopedia (CE), an online reference work on the Centennial State. It builds on the successful first phase that produced a website containing 700 authoritative articles on Colorado history and culture. Twenty-five percent of them have been leveled for 4th-, 8th, and 10th-grade readers, with co-curricular resource sets for teachers. Colorado State University in collaboration with Colorado Humanities and the University Press of Colorado will produce 300 new CE essays that will enable readers to take a “deeper dive” into the encyclopedia’s humanities themes, especially with an eye toward showing the inter-connections between entries and themes.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
Interdisciplinary Studies, General

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 7/31/2022

The digitization of 170,000 pages (113 linear feet) of recently discovered archival materials covering Jewish life in Eastern Europe dating from the seventeenth century to the immediate post-Holocaust period.

The Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Collections Project is a 7-year international preservation and access project launched in 2015 to preserve, digitally reunite, and provide free, online access to YIVO’s original archival and library collections, currently housed at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City and in Vilnius, Lithuania at three institutions: the Martynas Mažvydas National Library, the Lithuanian Central State Archives, and the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Arts and Sciences. The project is also preserving and digitally uniting the scattered remnants of the Strashun Library, one of the great Jewish libraries of prewar Europe.

Project fields:
European History; Russian History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals (outright + matching):
$193,248 (approved)
$193,248 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 4/30/2022

The cataloging and annotation of 40,000 born-digital sound recordings, moving images, and photographs that document the ethnography, music, and languages of African and African diaspora communities, for access via the Atlanta University Center’s library digital repository.

The primary work for the grant period is to catalogue and annotate a large inventory of born-digital recorded sound, moving images and photographs (over 40,000 files) for posting in our open-access repository and educational YouTube channels. The scholars involved in the Africana Digital Ethnography Project (ADEPt) have gathered extensive field recordings for a decade, with more to come before the start of the grant period (May 2019). The primary means of access to the collection will be through the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library’s open-access repository currently hosted by bepress’s Digital Commons (digitalcommons.auctr.edu/adept). Early into the grant period, content in the current Digital Commons repository will be migrated to an Islandora open-source system. All entries will be indexed on Google Scholar and WorldCat. Video clips will also be available on YouTube to maximize public engagement.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
African Studies; Comparative Languages; Ethnomusicology

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,808 (approved)
$349,808 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2019 – 5/31/2023

The enhanced description and digitization of 1,329 video recordings and 1,000 pages of programs related to the work and performances of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange.

The UMD Libraries requests $313,753.44 from the National Endowment for Humanities Humanities Collection and Reference Resources Foundations Grant program to describe and digitize the 1,329 unique video media assets and 211 programs (approximately 1,000 pages) from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange collection held by Special Collections in Performing Arts. Liz Lerman, a choreographer, performer, writer, educator, and speaker, founded the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976. Over a 40-year career, Lerman built a body of work and knowledge based on simple but radical ideas. Aspects of her work have won critical and scholarly attention and serves as important reference material for artists and collaborators within genomics, physics, law and medicine. Digitization is necessary for the preservation of this important documentation as they are deteriorating at a 15% rate. Lerman is developing a toolbox in partnership with Special Collections in which this digitized video are critical to the project.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
Dance History and Criticism

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$313,753 (approved)
$294,815 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 8/31/2021

Planning for a database of the Haitian art collection at the Waterloo Center of the Arts (WCA) in Waterloo, Iowa, which holds more than 1,500 works of art. The project would also support planning for the creation of the Haitian Arts Collaborative, a digital interface for Haitian art collections across the globe, including the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and the Haitian Cultural Art Alliance in Miami, Florida.

This project will complete two major tasks: First, to plan the digitization of the Haitian art collection at the Waterloo Center for the Arts in Waterloo, Iowa - the largest Haitian art collection in the United States. Secondly, we will plan an interface for considering diverse collections of Haitian art. Through the creation of these two public digital venues we hope to expand the field of Haitian art history and bring awareness to collections of Haitian art.

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Project fields:
Art History and Criticism

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$49,937 (approved)
$49,937 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 4/30/2021

The processing, rehousing, digital cataloging, and photographing of over 200,000 archaeological artifacts from five Boston sites, including Faneuil Hall, Paul Revere House, Boston Common, Brook Farm, and 27/29 Endicott Street.

Project proposes to increase access to five significant archaeological collections managed by the City of Boston through a digital artifact catalog, digital photography, online searchable artifact database, and individual web pages on boston.gov/archaeology. Project results will be disseminated through new museum exhibits, websites, and social media campaign.

Project fields:
American Studies; Archaeology; U.S. History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 4/30/2022

The digital reformatting of at-risk 16mm film and magnetic audiovisual tape in the Jane Kessler Memorial Archives at Penland School of Crafts. Films to be digitized include raw footage documenting the school and students in 1930, 1950, 1969, and 1979 and over 200 interviews, demonstrations, and workshops with notable artists and writers.

Founded in 1929, Penland School of Crafts is an international center for craft education dedicated to helping people live creative lives. Penland is at the forefront of the contemporary craft world while maintaining a strong link to its origins in traditional Appalachian culture. Penland’s history offers a complex array of values for the humanities that extend far beyond the making of things to include issues of culture, identity, place, collective work, creative process, lifelong learning, risk-taking, entrepreneurial spirit, and self-discovery. This history also relates to American history and government policies, educational and economic reform movements, and the creative economy. Penland’s archives collects and preserves unique materials that capture the rich history of the school. This proposal focuses on the digital reformatting of at-risk 16mm film and magnetic media in the Penland archives and the creation of a digital repository at Penland.

Project fields:
Arts, Other; Cultural History; Rural Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$153,745 (approved)
$153,745 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 4/30/2022

The digitization, cataloging, and transcription of approximately 410 pages of historical records, 6,300 pages of government documents, 200 photographs, and 50 oral histories documenting the history of Indian boarding schools and the experience of Native Americans who attended the Genoa Indian Boarding School in Genoa, Nebraska.

The Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project seeks a three-year, $350,000 Humanities Collections & Reference Resources Implementation Grant to digitize, contextualize, and make available materials related to the Genoa U.S. Industrial Indian School. The project is a collaboration between the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Genoa U.S. Indian School Foundation, working with a Community Advisors Council of tribal representatives. An HCRR grant from the NEH would enable the Project to complete the second phase of the project: the preservation and transcription of approximately 50 hours of oral histories of Genoa school attendees and the digitization and description of approximately 410 pages of records for Cheyenne and Arapaho children located at the Oklahoma State Historical Society, about 6,300 pages of U.S. government documents located in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and 200 photographic images at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
History, Other

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$349,899 (approved)
$349,899 (awarded)

Grant period:
6/1/2019 – 5/31/2023

A planning project to develop a digital library that would include books of vernacular Protestant music from the southern region of the United States published between 1850 and 1925.

Sounding Spirit is a planned digital library enabling access to hundreds of influential books of vernacular Protestant music of the southern United States diaspora from 1850 to 1925. Anchored at Emory Universitys Center for Digital Scholarship, this Foundations grant application draws together four institutions with outstanding collections of these materials and diverse digitization workflows and digital repositories: Emorys Pitts Theology Library, the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music at the University of Kentucky, and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. We seek to 1.) launch a pilot site featuring twenty volumes, 2.) document processes for digitization and portal ingest that meet diverse institutional needs, 3.) draft a list of 500 to 700 volumes for a planned expanded portal, 4.) share our findings to enable comparable work elsewhere, and 5.) formalize an ongoing partnership among collaborators.

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Project fields:
American Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$58,230 (approved)
$58,230 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 4/30/2020

A planning project to convene two three-day workshops for museum professionals and community members in order to ensure the preservation of an Indigenous watercraft collection comprising 16 Alaska Native handmade boats, 97 model boats, and 100 accessories, such as paddles, sleds, and specialized tools.

The ethnology & history department at the University of Alaska Museum of the North (UAMN) seeks $60,000 in funding from the NEH HCRR Foundations grant program to host two workshops focusing on our Indigenous watercraft at the museum in Fairbanks, Alaska. The workshops will bring together a diverse group of stakeholders including Alaska Native cultural experts, academic researchers, objects conservators, museum professionals, local craftspeople, and students in order to plan for a future IMLS HCRR implementation grant. With this wide range of perspectives, we will collaborate to identify the priorities in caring for and sharing the important Indigenous watercraft collection at the UAMN. Using the physical objects as the focus of our discussions, project participants will spend three days each year, for two years, examining and discussing the watercraft and their future physical needs, as well as possible research and community-based projects that could be undertaken using these items.

Project fields:
Native American Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$60,000 (approved)
$57,768 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 4/30/2023

The enhancement of 6,000 records in the AFI Catalog of Feature Films, for silent films released from 1910 to 1930, as well as the upgrading of the catalog database to identify 500,000 name credits by gender, covering the first one hundred years of film history from 1893 to 1993.

The American Film Institute (AFI) upholds the first tenet of its mission -- to preserve the history of the motion picture -- through the AFI Catalog of Feature Films, an authoritative online resource documenting 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 enhance documentation for 6,000 films released from 1910 to 1930, completing the historic record of the silent era in the AFI Catalog, and, in the process, expanding scholarly and public understanding of women’s foundational role in the creation of the cinematic art form. The initiative will also include technological upgrades making possible the evaluation of the database’s 500,000 personal name credits by gender, providing previously unavailable data to inaugurate a cardinal study of gender parity in the first century of American film.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
Film History and Criticism; Women's History

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$350,000 (approved)
$350,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 12/31/2022

The preservation, transcription, translation, and digitization of audiovisual materials that document Crow history, language, and culture.

Little Big Horn College is proposing a project funded through the NEH to continue to digitize historical and cultural materials related to the Crow Indians. The college holds a great deal of antiquated audiovisual materials and will create digital copies saved on a server, tape drive, and off site. Once digitized, the audio and video will be placed online via the Content Management System, Mukurtu allowing for culturally appropriate use. Along with digitization, the project proposes to create translations and transcripts to aid those who lack fluency in the Crow language. Professionals in the field will produce the transcriptions. Weaving all of this together, virtual displays will utilize audiovisual content, transcripts, and other archival materials held at the college. The project team will receive feedback and assistance from outside professionals from the Sustainable Heritage Project at Washington State University and the Montana Historical Society.

Project fields:
Native American Studies

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals:
$330,422 (approved)
$330,422 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 4/30/2023

The digitization of 16,000 recordings of Mexican-American vernacular music from the Strachwitz Frontera Collection, dating from the late-1920s to the mid-1990s.

The Arhoolie Foundation is requesting a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue its successful preservation and digitization of the Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings (The Frontera Collection), the world's most complete collection of Mexican American vernacular music. This present proposal seeks to continue our work and support the digital preservation of an additional 16,000 individual performances; approximately 700 from 78-rpm discs, 5,600 from 45-rpm discs, 8,400 from 33-1/3 rpm LPs, 300 from cassettes, and 1,000 one-of-a-kind reel-to-reel master tapes from the Falcon label. The purpose of this program is to preserve this historically valuable collection and to make it accessible to students, researchers and the general public. The digitizing process involves making digital copies of the sound recordings, scanning the record label, tape boxes, LP covers and notes) and adding them to our UCLA online database.

Project fields:
Latin American History; Music History and Criticism

Program:
Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Division:
Preservation and Access

Totals (outright + matching):
$198,746 (approved)
$198,746 (awarded)

Grant period:
5/1/2019 – 6/30/2022