Search
Close this search box.
Search
Close this search box.

2014 Funded Projects

> See 2008 Projects | 2009 Projects | 2010 Projects | 2011 Projects | 2012 Projects | 2013 Projects | 2014 Projects

The following nineteen projects were selected from among ninety-two proposals submitted in 2014. Award recipients will create web-accessible records according to standards that will enable the federation of their local cataloging entries into larger groups of related records, enabling the broadest possible exposure to the scholarly community.


Adirondack Historical Association
Living with Wilderness: Enhancing Access to The Adirondack Museum Historic Photograph Collection
$157,685

The Adirondack Museum will catalog 15,000 rare images documenting the history of human interaction with the Adirondack environment, providing online access to scholars throughout the world. Making the images visible is a high priority given growing interest in our collective need to sustain economically viable communities while simultaneously preserving large areas of natural, undeveloped landscape. This project will be the first time the Adirondack Museum will proactively select images for targeted cataloging based on their relevance to researchers in a variety of academic disciplines including environmental history; forest history; geography; the history of outdoor recreation and tourism; art and architectural history; and gender studies.


Appalshop, Inc.
We Still Scream: The Mountain Eagle/Tom and Pat Gish Archives
$90,605

Appalshop seeks to create public and scholarly access to the historic paper and mixed media archives of the crusading publishers Tom and Pat Gish and The Mountain Eagle newspaper. This regional weekly in rural Appalachia is a nationally recognized model of journalistic courage, commitment to community and investigative reporting, and holding power to account in strained economic circumstances. The collaborative project will assess at-risk materials, create a catalog record and series-level finding aid in EAD format, and develop an outreach plan for access. The accessible collection will be useful across scholarly disciplines, reaching a wide user base via OCLC, Archive Grid, and sites such as Kentucky Digital Library.


Bowling Green State University
Getting to the Core: Cataloging 45-RPM Records
$64,064

This project will result in the cataloging of approximately 64,800 45-RPM recordings of popular music over 3 years. Cataloging will be available on the open web via Bowling Green State University’s online catalog and will be performed by student assistants trained and supervised by our existing Music Catalog and Metadata Librarian. The result will be greater discovery for a significant portion of recordings that exist in few library collections and that are rarely, if ever, cataloged. The emphasis will be on major-label recordings that are not already documented in existing library catalogs or published discographies.


Computer History Museum
Computer History Museum Archives Processing Project (CHM APP)
$274,560

The Computer History Museum will process and make publicly available 26 of its most significant yet hidden collections documenting the Information Age and its ongoing impact on society. The Computer History Museum Archives Processing Project is a two year project that will utilize More Product Less Process (MPLP) techniques to make the collections available as quickly and efficiently as possible. By the project’s completion, 26 finding aids will be posted to the Museum’s online catalog and to the Online Archive of California (OAC), and will be publicized via relevant professional newsletters and social media outlets.


Go For Broke National Education Center
Segregated Japanese American Military Units of World War II: A Collaborative Online Repository of Oral Histories, Photos and Documents
$260,975

Go For Broke National Education Center will conduct a collaborative two-year project to create an online repository of oral histories, photos and documents of the Japanese American men who served in segregated units during WWII. The collection will include 1,300 oral histories and 1,500 photos and documents with powerful search capabilities that connect the user from a search result to the corresponding moment in an oral history and relevant still images. This collaborative collection from Go for Broke and Japanese American veteran organizations in Chicago, Seattle and Hawaii will be the largest collection of primary source materials about these men whose life stories deepen our understanding of the rights, responsibilities and challenges of American citizenship.


Haverford College
Quaker Diaries, Journals, Commonplace Books and Small Manuscript Collections
$59,328

The Haverford College Libraries will catalog and describe 166 linear feet of Quaker diaries, journals, commonplace books, other manuscript volumes and collections.  As a social group, the Quakers had expansive influence in important civil rights issues and beyond.  As such, the topics covered by these materials include : slavery and anti-slavery: war and pacifism; gardening and agriculture; mental health issues; Native Americans; science; literature; mysticism; relief and reconstruction; prison reform; travel; colonialism and nationhood; and the American experience over time. The project will expose significant scholarly resources that will directly impact teaching, research and the discovery of new knowledge.


Harvard University
Bridging the Research Data Divide: Rethinking Long-term Value and Access for Historical and Contemporary Maternal, Infant and Child Research
$367,602

The collaborating libraries will create rich metadata for discovery, access, citation, and long-term preservation of maternal, infant, child, and youth health research data. Work will focus on 1) historical paper and electronic research data for longitudinal studies, 1930-2010 (from the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard), and 2) contemporary electronic research data for Canadian cohort and clinical trials from the Maternal, Infant, Child, Youth Research Network (from the University of Alberta Libraries). This project will bring temporal depth in laying the groundwork for value-added long-term access to and preservation of the collections, while protecting the privacy of historical and current research participants and communities of study.


Johns Hopkins University
Processing the Globe Collection and Press
$180,156

Johns Hopkins University and Maryland Institute College of Art will partner to oversee the arrangement, description and preservation of the archives of the Globe Collection and Press.  The collection includes business records, posters, letterpress cuts, and other material documenting the history of one of the most important showcard poster companies in the United States.


The Mariners’ Museum Library
The Maritime World in Photographs: Cataloguing the Photo Negatives of The Mariners’ Museum
$325,500

The Mariners’ Museum Library, the largest maritime library in the Western Hemisphere, will catalog at the item level over the next three years its most significant holdings of 19th and early 20th century photographic negatives.   These negatives, numbering over 48,000, have never been printed or cataloged, yet they contain images of a vanished maritime world captured by photographers of recognized artistic merit.  The images are of ships, steamboats and small craft from around the world and of the people who built and worked in them.  The photos are also of port cities and towns that may no longer exist.  Scholars, teachers and artists will benefit from the story these photos tell about our past and potentially about our future.


Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Illuminating New York’s Art and Performance Heritage from the 1960s to the Present: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives Audiovisual Collections
$122,208

This two-year project will allow the public to discover and access, for the first time, unique audiovisual collections documenting the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s influential and vibrant history of exhibitions, performances, and public programs from the 1960s to present. Despite the cultural and intellectual value of these collections, they remain hidden to the public. Recordings have only been identified at the box level as “audiovisual,” with no formal arrangement or description, making it difficult for even the most experienced researchers to discover them. An estimated 298 cubic feet of audiovisual recordings and over 50 cubic feet of paper records will be made available to scholars, students, and the public.


Storefront for Art and Architecture
Arranging and Describing Storefront’s Archive
$115,600

Storefront for Art & Architecture will process, describe, and make public its archive of programming records. These records document Storefront’s diverse and influential program of over 280 exhibitions and affiliated performances, lectures, publications and events dating from its founding in 1982. Featuring the work of 1,500+ architects, artists and designers, this material includes a collection of original artwork and over 107 linear feet of programming documents, photographic prints and negatives, audiovisual media, newsletters and publications that together constitute a unique, underrepresented repository of national significance.


Trace Foundation/Latse Library
Tibetan Audio-Visual Collections at Trace Foundation’s Latse Library
$160,389

For two decades, Trace Foundation’s Latse Library has been one of the only institutions in the world comprehensively acquiring audio-visual materials from Tibetan and Himalayan regions. The collection of nearly 7,000 items is the largest of its kind and represents the vast array of Tibetan music and performing arts, in both audio and video formats that have emerged since the Cultural Revolution (1967-76), a time of great socio-economic change. Over 28 months, this project will provide access to these otherwise hidden resources for the benefit of scholars, researchers, students, and widespread Tibetan communities, and serve as a model for other institutions that seek to catalog similar multilingual A/V materials.


University of California, Los Angeles
La Raza Newspaper & Magazine Records: Providing Access to the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement
$148,021

This three-year project will catalog a collection of 24,698 photographic negatives documenting the Mexican-descent community of Los Angeles between 1967 and 1977. These long inaccessible negatives were recovered in 2013, and represent an unprecedented decade-long photographic project involving eighteen photographers associated with La Raza. The bilingual publication-a tabloid newspaper from 1967 to 1970 and a magazine from 1970 to 1977-developed in the context of community-based journalism that sought broad documentation of events, achievements, and issues reflecting readers’ lives. Since La Raza could only print a small portion of photographs, this collection constitutes a rare and broad visual record of the community during this period.


University of Illinois
Cataloging Cavagna: Italian imprints from the Sixteenth through the Nineteenth Century
$498,942

The project will catalog some 20,000 rare Italian imprints from the 16th through 19th centuries in the historically significant Cavagna Collection, using our innovative and highly successful “Quick & Clean Rare Book Cataloging” model originally funded by the Mellon Foundation (2006-2009). In this model, a lead rare book cataloger serves as Project Manager to train apprentice catalogers drawn from local GSLIS students and recent MLS graduates, with an eye toward both speed and accuracy, and with costs averaging less than $25 per volume. Using this model, we plan to make this rich collection accessible to scholars in multiple fields, including but not limited to Italian history, literature, art, theatre, law, economics, and religion.


University of Kentucky Research Foundation
Action in Appalachia: Revealing Public Health, Housing, and Community Development Records in the UK Libraries Special Collections Research Center
$156,439

This two-year project will result in 645 cubic feet of fully processed Appalachian records comprising seven hidden collections of War on Poverty-era, social justice organizational records. These community-driven groups worked to improve public health, housing, education, and economic development from the 1960s to the present by taking action in Appalachia. These records include those of the Appalachian Leadership and Community Outreach, Inc., a collaborative program for college students, and the Congress on Religion in Appalachia, an ecumenical response to the War on Poverty.  Accessibility to these collections will contribute to new scholarship and public understanding about the social and economic development of Appalachia.


University of Virginia
Book Traces @ UVA
$221,379

Our project will create metadata to record significant unique characteristics of titles in the circulating collections of the University of Virginia Library, focusing on 19th century titles.  Many titles in our 19th century circulating collections have evidentiary or artifactual value due to characteristics such as marginalia, inserts, unique bindings, etc.  Although these books are in the catalog, the unique, distinguishing features of the books are undocumented and therefore undiscoverable, hidden in plain sight in our stacks. We will provide enhanced metadata for these titles, and create a protocol for the discovery and sorting process which we will share so that institutions can cooperate on preservation, retention and weeding projects.


Wellesley College
The Wellesley Centers for Women Records, 1974-
$68,550

Processing the records of the Wellesley Centers for Women is a one-year project to catalog and create robust finding aids for an approximately 50 linear feet collection documenting the history and activities of one of the largest gender-focused research-and-action organizations in the world. There are also a number of born-digital files for the more current records, some of which are restricted by law, and electronic repositories currently used by Wellesley will be incorporated to manage those digital files.


WGBH Educational Foundation
National Educational Television Collection Catalog
$458,619

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting will develop a national catalog of National Educational Television (NET) titles. NET (1952-1972) comprises the earliest public television content, about 8-10,000 titles, including some incisive social documentaries. WGBH, WNET, Indiana University and the Library of Congress hold the largest collections of NET materials. Programs are scattered, descriptions are limited and in obscure sources, and there is no publicly accessible list of titles. A national catalog with descriptive data gathered during this project will give scholars access to the NET collection. WGBH will develop the catalog and contract with the Library of Congress to process its NET materials for inclusion.


WHYY, Inc.
Fresh Air in the Sunlight: Opening Access to Forty Years of WHYY’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross
$254,769

WHYY seeks support to create free access to its 38+-year collection of the Peabody Award-winning national radio program Fresh Air with Terry Gross.  Produced and owned totally by WHYY, this award-winning, weekday magazine of contemporary arts and culture is in its 38th year of production and the 27th year of national distribution.  8,000 of these rich oral histories of best in class literary, visual and performing artists dating from 1976 till today have been digitized and archived by WHYY but are hidden from the public.  Drexel University in Philadelphia will serve as a sub-contracted partner on this project bringing extensive experience in the standardization, cataloguing and “open access” of archives and hidden collections to the project.


Skip to content