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This three-year project will fund an Audiovisual Archivist position for in-house digitization of 1,000 hours of unique audiovisual content from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive’s WJZ-TV Collection. The collection contains analog video tapes created by local Baltimore, Maryland television station WJZ-TV. The 1,000 hours selected for digitization will contain previously hidden stories documenting the voices of underrepresented communities in Baltimore City from 1977-2000. This includes footage from the series “City Line”, a public affairs television program produced by a majority Black cast and crew that aired from 1982 to 1989, with topics centered around Baltimore City’s Black community. Other potential histories to be represented in the project would be the Lumbee Tribe, Asian Americans, immigrant populations, the LGBTQI community fight for equal rights, among many others. Digitized materials will be made accessible via the Digital Public Library of America, Internet Archive, and Aviary.
The two-year project will prepare and digitize thousands of significant, often unknown art, maps, audio/video tapes, and archives in 15 collections of consortium members Clark Atlanta, Florida A&M, Jackson State, Texas Southern and Tuskegee Universities, to be uploaded on an open-source platform available worldwide. They amplify the voices of African Americans and increase scholarly and public awareness of their contributions to the essential but often untold stories of America. This is part of the History and Culture Access (HCAC) Initiative, a five-year pilot project led by the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) that includes a national traveling exhibition, catalogue, and training for approximately 90 museum and archives professionals at all levels. Activities include cleaning/preparation, metadata compilation, and digitizing. Many items will be part of an exhibition shown at a minimum 12-14 venues, including NMAAHC, further drawing awareness among African American communities, scholars, and the general public.
“Unboxed: Revealing Untold Stories of Japanese Americans During World War II” is a three-year project that will generate 10,000 images and scans of two-dimensional archival materials (including photographs, correspondence, manuscripts, ephemera, scrapbooks, and artworks) related to the Japanese American World War II experience from the museum’s pre-eminent collection and make these formerly “hidden” historical assets more widely accessible. The digital assets along with accompanying metadata produced from this project will become available to the public through JANM’s “Collections Page” as well as through the California Digital Library’s (CDL) Calisphere website and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). With CLIR support, JANM will be able to properly digitize thousands of artifacts while reaching larger audiences, providing researchers, educators, students, and the general public with greater access and more information on an underrepresented perspective of a consequential moment in US history and a poignant reminder of the fragility of democracy.
PrisonPandemic, initiated in University of California (UC) Irvine’s Schools of Social Sciences and Social Ecology, partnered with California community organizations to collect 3,248 letters, artworks, and phone calls from people incarcerated in state and federal prisons, jails, and immigrant detention facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose to redact and digitize these materials. Over a two-year period, we will (1) partner with the UC Libraries to add these materials to the existing digital collections platform, Calisphere, providing free and sustainable access to artifacts, and (2) integrate Calisphere assets into our project website, increasing discoverability and accessibility. Incarcerated people’s stories are difficult to collect in ethical and respectful ways and underrepresented in digital collections, but desperately needed to understand the toll of COVID-19 on marginalized populations. Community members, lawyers, journalists, students, and interdisciplinary scholars will access the archive, increasing public knowledge and awareness of the inequalities experienced by incarcerated people.
This three-year project undertaken by the Office of the Treaty Commissioner (OTC) will digitize and facilitate access to Indigenous oral histories of Treaties negotiated between the Crown and Indigenous nations in Canada. The OTC works with the Saskatchewan Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations to support and promote the on-going treaty relationship. Beginning in 1989 the OTC has collected extensive oral histories from Indigenous Elders across Western Canada, preserving knowledge that has been passed down through generations on the negotiation, spirit and intent of treaties. These oral histories were recorded on a variety of analogue formats that are now difficult to access and in danger of deterioration. This project will amplify these collections through digitization and knowledge mobilization activities. The oral history of treaties are often hidden behind written records, but they should be front and centre because they provide the foundation for modern reconciliation efforts in Canada.
Christiansburg Institute, Inc. proposes a two-year collaborative partnership with Virginia Tech to digitize 52,245 manuscript pages, photographs, student newspapers, costumes, and other objects of material culture that speak to the 100-year story of Christiansburg Industrial Institute (1866-1966). The history of the school is emblematic of the triumphs and struggles generations of African Americans faced in the Appalachian South when Reconstruction and Jim Crow threatened their dignity economic autonomy, and collective community agency. Thousands of students passed through its halls during its century life, leaving behind records from their time at the school. Alumni organized and advocated for the history of their school for over fifty years, but the historical distribution of preservation funds limited their success. This funding request will support digitization and create online access to previously inaccessible materials. The databases will be created with alumni input and freely accessible to the Christiansburg Institute community, educators, and scholars.
The Archives and Distinctive Collections at the College of the Holy Cross is proposing a two-year project to digitize key components of the Deaf Catholic Archives (DCA) in order to make this unique information discoverable, accessible, and usable to the Deaf community as well as researchers and anyone interested in the material. The collection provides insight into the history of Deaf culture as well as an understanding of how Deaf Catholics practice their faith (culturally) in new ways, when traditional methods are insufficient. A wide variety of materials are included such as documents, photographs and ephemera from a variety of institutions across the globe including: parishes, Deaf Catholic schools, and regional Deaf Catholic organizations.
The two year “The Indigenous Eye” project will allow Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI) to digitize and make available to the public the Cyril George Photograph Collection, a 14 linear foot collection of approximately 4,000 photographs spanning 75 years of history in a rural Tlingit community in Southeast Alaska. In the first year of the project, SHI will pack and transfer the photographs to the Alaska State Archives for digitization. The Alaska State Archives conducts digitization of the highest quality. SHI will then rehouse the photograph collection and create a photo book to encourage public involvement in the project. In the second year, SHI will create an online finding aid with digital objects and conduct community outreach to gather contextual details preserved in the photographs to incorporate in the finding aid. SHI will use its online collections database to make the photograph collection and finding aid available to the public.
Fifty Years of Creative Growth will digitize and provide access to 2,500 objects that document an art studio and gallery that changed the contemporary art world by amplifying the visual voices of people with developmental disabilities. The collection is a material record of Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California, and includes paintings, drawings, textiles, ceramics and ephemera representing some 500 artists who helped spawn the “outsider art” category, including many whose work is today included in the permanent collections of the world’s most revered art institutions. Creative Growth was the first organization of its kind, founded in 1974 by Florence and Elias Katz on the belief that given the space to make art, people with developmental, intellectual, and physical disabilities would find outlets for powerful self-expression. The collection will promote scholarship at the nexus of art and disability and preserve a unique body of work.
The Haida Gwaii Museum proposes to undertake a 12 month project to digitize archival special collections containing recordings of oral histories, historic accounts, and interviews with Elders and knowledge holders. This project will: 1) create capacity through staff training and equipment purchase to digitize further materials that originate from the community and accept the responsibility for future transfers of digital files, 2) make the previously inaccessible digitized collections accessible within the archive oral history lab and online via the HGM online database, and 3) upgrade digital storage capabilities and formalize preservation and access protocol to ensure long-term preservation of and access to digital files. Making the recordings accessible to the community and visitors to Haida Gwaii and the museum will contribute to the continuance of Haida culture and language, suuda gan unsid ad gina ‘waadlux̱an gan yahguudang X̱aayda Gwaay.yaay iijii – inspiring respect and understanding for all that Haida Gwaii is.
This project is an ambitious, 10-member collaboration led by the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) to digitize a wide range of materials documenting transgender, gender non-conforming (GNC), and gender-expansive Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC). Based at Northeastern University, the DTA is a freely available online collection of trans-related historical materials that already includes over 8,900 items contributed by more than 60 archives. The DTA is an award-winning, widely used resource that transforms gender-transgressive histories into far more accessible resources for public engagement. This grant will amplify the voices of those who are underrepresented in archives writ large and within our own holdings––more specifically, trans/GNC/gender-expansive BIPOC communities. With this grant, we will digitize and make available ~20,500 pages of mixed archival materials, ~600 images, and 22 audiovisual items, and we will develop outreach projects including a 4-episode podcast, an 8-part video series, and several lesson plans.
The African American Museum of Iowa (AAMI), Des Moines Public Library (DMPL), Fort Des Moines Museum & Education Center (FDMM), Grinnell College Libraries, Grout Museum District (GMD), Iowa State University Library (ISU), Nodaway Valley Historical Museum (NVHM), and State Historical Society of Iowa (SHSI) propose a three-year collaborative project to digitize and provide unified access to a variety of complementary collections that will elevate the histories, shared experiences, and achievements of Black communities throughout the state of Iowa. The collections, ranging from newspapers and manuscripts to oral histories and artifacts, will be used in community outreach and programming, educational and curriculum support, and academic research projects and initiatives. This collaborative project, the first of its kind for the state, seeks to center and amplify hitherto hidden Black voices throughout Iowa as but one small step in the antiracist action needed to build a more inclusive narrative of the Midwest.
This 36-month project extends five years of work between nine Native American nations and four institutions (American Philosophical Society, National Museum of the American Indian, University of Washington, Washington State University) to advance the practice of collaborative curation. During this time, in-depth research and culturally responsive digital tools and workflows reconnected Native communities with collections at non-Native repositories. The proposed project will now digitize the collections already identified by Tribal partners at multiple repositories and return them to the Native American partners via the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal (https://plateauportal.libraries.wsu.edu) and the Native Northwest Portal (TBD). Using Mukurtu CMS and the Mukurtu Metadata Transformation Toolkit, each Native partner will review, update metadata, assign protocols for access and Traditional Knowledge Labels to digitized content. This information will be shared with the non-Native repositories via Mukurtu’s Roundtrip thereby, providing a direct and sustainable pathway for ongoing digital returns, and culturally enhanced public records.
Seeking to preserve and make public the history of Chicago’s Puerto Rican community, a group of local scholars and the Juan Antonio Corretjer Puerto Rican Cultural Center (PRCC)—an influential progressive community organization founded in 1973—will process and digitize thousands of items from the PRCC’s archive. Items include political posters, event fliers, bilingual community newspapers, correspondence, photographs, and audio/videotapes that offer unique insight into the major challenges and movements that have shaped the life of Puerto Ricans in Chicago. This digitization project will train and employ community residents and students and organize a series of public events, including exhibitions and educational forums. Ultimately, it aims to use the PRCC’s archive as the pilot collection for a sustainable community-led digital archive that will focus on the political, organizational, and cultural history of Puerto Rican Chicago and serve as a springboard and model for other community organizations.
Beck Cultural Exchange Center proposes the Cherished Institutions Project to digitize the history of education for Black students in Knoxville, Tennessee, amplifying Black voices by preserving and making accessible their stories. Over a three-year period, Beck will hire staff to rehouse, digitize, and make available virtually 60 linear feet of archival material related to the Black experience with segregated education, including yearbooks, student publications, and photographs. Many of the items in the collection are the only remaining copies in existence. Digitization is critical for fragile objects to ensure these stories of Black achievement and community are not lost. Without this project, generations of Black voices are in danger of remaining silenced if the collection will remain inaccessible as objects for learning, research, and consciousness-raising. Without a better conception of regional history, the story of this nation cannot be fully and correctly understood. The Cherished Institution Project will achieve this milestone.
The University of Alaska, University of Washington, and Western Washington University herbaria propose a collaborative, 2-year project to digitize and create online access to 23,000 vascular plant specimens from the Russian Far East held in their respective collections. The Russian Far East is a botanically diverse region with floristic affinities with arctic regions of North America, Europe, and Asia. Despite over a century of botanical exploration in the Russian Far East, historical and financial obstacles have resulted in limited availability of botanical specimen data to researchers worldwide. Requested funding supports databasing, imaging, georeferencing, label translation (where necessary), and creation of online access to Russian Far East vascular plant specimens. These data will be freely accessible to and downloadable by scholars researching the taxonomy, distribution, origins of, and potential climate change impacts on the Russian Far East and arctic floras.
Our three-year collaborative project will digitize Cal State LA and USC’s unique collections of Mesoamerican, Indigenous, and Spanish colonial artifacts, rare books, photographs, and slides and create digital access to previously hidden materials documenting the Mesoamerican region. These valuable and rarely seen objects highlight the rich histories and diverse cultural heritage of Mexico and the Central American Isthmus, and the profound contributions to art, science, architecture, and language by the Maya, Toltec, Aztecs, and Shaft Tomb cultures, among other Indigenous peoples. They also revealSpanish colonial influences on cultures and the built environment. With the digitization of 360 artifacts previously unphotographed for national digital platforms, 59 rare books with unique color plates, historical maps, and marginalia, and 24,827 original photographs that document material changes at keyAztec, Maya, and other Mesoamerican sites from the 1930s to the 1990s, global audiences will explore many facets of the region’s complex history.
The Lowcountry Digital Library proposes to digitize—with free access for the public—key components of the Jewish Heritage Collections from the College of Charleston’s Special Collections in order to shed light on the hidden history of Southern Judaism. Centered on Charleston, South Carolina’s early nineteenth-century Jewish history, the twelve-month project will digitize source materials including family papers, synagogue records, and photograph collections. The materials will contribute to scholarship in three major ways, illuminating Charleston’s history as the birthplace of Reform Judaism, documenting American Jews’ participation in slavery, and uncovering women’s role in shaping American Judaism. Given that all three of these aspects of Southern Jewish history have been neglected by scholars, this project will advance the scholarship by revealing these underdeveloped themes. Through digitization, advanced metadata, a public lecture, and a digital exhibit, this project will provide resources for scholars, public historians, students, and the broader public.
Fisk Forever: Digitizing Materials by and About Fisk University is a two-year project for the Fisk University John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library to digitize, describe, and make its Fiskiana Collection publicly available online. The Fiskiana Collection contains all materials by and about Fisk University, its faculty, students, alumni, and friends. More specifically, the collection includes university catalogues and yearbooks, faculty and student handbooks, commencement, festival, and convocation programs, reports of conventions and conferences, student and alumni publications, artifacts, and oral histories. Once completed, this sustainable project will connect the world to primary resources for scholarly production about Fisk University’s unique culture and heritage from its founding in 1866 until forever.
“The Ruth Finley Collection: Digitizing 70 Years of the Fashion Calendar” is a 24-month digitization and digital humanities project organized by The Fashion Institute of Technology. The project will increase access, discoverability and search optimization of the Ruth Finley Collection [RFC], comprised of FIT’s unique Fashion Calendar archive and two supplementary publications that detail home furnishings and fashion news. For 70 years, Finley (1920-2018), a legend in American fashion, was the exclusive publisher of this independent, weekly periodical that served as the official scheduling clearinghouse for the American fashion industry. Finley documented and directly influenced the development of American fashion during its ascendancy in the 20th century, along with access to other global fashion centers. This project will be the most substantial contribution to-date of new knowledge to the field of American and global fashion and cultural studies, with significant impact for scholars, educators, students and the public everywhere.
“Advancing Workers Rights in the American South”—a collaboration between Georgia State University(GSU) and University of Maryland (UMD)—will digitize and provide access to AFL-CIO (AmericanFederation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) Civil Rights Southeast Division and national-level records from the AFL, CIO, and AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department. The records include correspondence, newspaper clippings, photographs, audiovisual recordings, and more documenting AFL-CIO work between 1943 and 1999. These records provide invaluable insights into the intersection of civil rights and labor movements nationally and especially in the South. Making these documents widely available will promote scholarship and community awareness of historical equality issues, which still plague our world today. Digital objects will be freely accessible in GSU and UMD digital collections repositories and shared with the Digital Library of Georgia, to be disseminated through the Digital PublicLibrary of America, Umbra Search African American History, and Civil Rights Digital Library.
The KVZK / American Samoa Public Media Digitization Project seeks to digitize, preserve, and make accessible 11,643 historic public television programs produced by KVZK from 1965 to 2020. KVZK, a PBS member television station serving American Samoa, has been on the air since 1964. The station was initially established to provide instructional programming to schools in American Samoa and has continued to record and document the unique history, culture and landscape of the island.
The collection currently resides on deteriorating and obsolete magnetic tapes, which are also increasingly threatened by sea level rise and coastal surges.
The Library of Congress will preserve the digitized materials, and the collection will be made available in the AAPB at https://americanarchive.org. KVZK will also acquire digital copies to use in future programming that will continue to inspire and educate the people of American Samoa for years to come.
The three-year project will digitize 1,015 videotapes produced from 1967-1979 with the collections of six institutions from across the United States. They represent the “Guerrilla Television” movement, a period when artists, activists, and community organizers utilized the new technology of portable video to create experimental works outside the restricted structures of broadcast television. The project partners include: Appalshop, Community TV Network (CTVN), Kartemquin Films, Media Burn Archive, and New Orleans Video Access Center (NOVAC). The project will also create a dedicated portal to present more than 1,615 total videos and metadata, including previously digitized work. It will represent the first time that the majority of these videos have been accessible to the public. Moreover, partnering with the UChicago Library creates an opportunity to curate videos within the portal to serve a broad set of researchers.
Mount Mary University (MMU) seeks to expand the reach of its hidden Fashion Archive (formerly the Historic Costume Collection) to inform scholarship on fashion design and the changing role of women throughout history. Over the course of two years, MMU’s Fashion Archive Digitization Project proposes to photograph, digitize, catalog, and preserve garments from the university’s historic clothing collection. With approximately 10,000 items, the Archive features an array of couture, ready-to-wear, and everyday garments and accessories, acquired primarily through donations, highlighting design and construction techniques from the mid-18th century to the present, though chiefly from the 20th century. Many designers within the collection are not well represented online. Building off a 2018 pilot grant funded by the Stella H. Jones Foundation, the broader digitization of the Fashion Archive (FA) will make these valuable, hidden resources widely accessible to students, scholars, artists, designers, and other interested researchers for scholarship and inspiration.
This project will provide accessibility for the public and researchers to MoPOP’s unique collection of early hip-hop materials. The totality of this collection includes internationally significant material artifacts and highlights music history, art, race, and popular culture. Hip-hop history, while having a seismic impact on world culture, is underrepresented in archival collections – especially online, digitally accessible content. MoPOP’s Collection, Curatorial, and IT Departments will be responsible for managing the project. Over 1,000 photographs, interviews, musical instruments, ephemera, costume, and other objects of material culture will be digitized, cataloged, and uploaded to the MoPOP online portal via the eMuseum platform. This two-year project will encourage further historical scholarship in the field of study by giving researchers and the general public access to previously inaccessible materials. This project will enable global access to materials that document the origins of a musical and social movement that has defined modern culture and society.
Northeast Historic Film (NHF) will undertake a 24-month project to catalog, digitize and make accessible, locally originated programming from WCVB in Boston, MA. WCVB launched in 1972 with a goal of redefining the conventional wisdom of what a television station could do. They originated 60 hours of programming a week, more than twice that of any other station. They created shows which changed the face of television across the country. These recently donated master videotapes and 16mm film reels consist of over 2,400 programs produced by WCVB between 1972 and 1997. These range from the first legal affairs program (Miller’s Court), to a sitcom (Park Street Under- which was taken by NBC and renamed Cheers), to groundbreaking children’s programming like Jabberwocky, and youth and minority produced programming like Rapmatazz and Aqui. Collections of this scope are extremely rare, if they exist at all, raising the likelihood of significant scholarly use.
Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage is the 27-year-old research center that has recovered, researched and digitized more Latino/Hispanic materials than any other in history. It is also the Center for Latino Digital Humanities. Recovery proposes to digitize, create the metadata for and upload for open access its own collection of 200 Spanish-language (a few in English) periodicals (some 200,000 pages) published along the US-Mexico border from 1850 to 1956, which it holds on newsprint and/or microfilm. From Brownsville TX to San Diego CA, and the northern Mexican states of Coahuila and Tamaulipas, most of the periodicals have never been accessible to scholars and most comprise the only extant copies. The newspapers are important especially for scholars interested in border studies, international relations, political science, history, literature, Mexican American/Latino Studies and feminist studies. Women edited or wrote significantly in a dozen of the newspapers.
This project will digitize approximately 3,000 archival documents and photographs that reveal the transition from science to survival in the collection of Georg and Max Bredig. All German correspondence (roughly 1,100 letters) will be transcribed and translated into English. The pre-1933 material details Georg Bredig’s scientific training under the founders of physical chemistry. However, after his forced retirement in 1933, the archive documents the demise of his career and very way of life under the ThirdReich. Through the correspondence of Georg’s son, Max (a scientist in his own right), we see Max’s tireless efforts to help his family and friends escape after he had successfully fled Germany in 1937. The highly intimate and often harrowing details found across this collection chronicle the Bredig family’s struggle to survive Nazi-occupied Europe, to secure visas and offers of employment for themselves and their colleagues, and to emigrate to the United States.
The University of Idaho Library and Alfred W. Bowers Laboratory of Anthropology (Bowers Lab) will pursue a two-year project to digitize the Donald E. Crabtree Lithic Comparative Collection. This preeminent collection includes lithic (stone) artifacts created by Crabtree as well as documents, slides, and photographs related to his work. All collection materials will be digitized in 2D and made available via a specially created version of the Library’s in-house, open source web-based digital collection tool, CollectionBuilder. Two hundred exemplary artifacts will also undergo 3D photogrammetric digitization for inclusion in a “Virtual Lithics Lab,” giving website visitors a “hands-on” experience with these fragile artifacts. Making this hidden collection visible will reinvigorate interest in lithic technology and flintknapping (the creation of chipped lithic tools) among archaeologists, educators, students, and the general public as well as facilitate community dialogue about the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge.
This project will digitize and reveal a large collection of photographs that document the reproductive histories of individual right whales that calved at Península Valdés (PV), Argentina between 1971 and 2004. These images were made during the early years of the world’s longest-running study of reproduction in a large cetacean species, based on photo-identification of known individuals. Now in its 50th year, the PV study is central to a global initiative that will use right-whale demographics to monitor how climate change affects the Southern Ocean ecosystem. The study’s early analog photos remain vital to ongoing research because many individual whales seen in them are still alive and reproducing. The Marriott Library will team with Ocean Alliance to digitize this collection and its rich metadata, and to make all of it openly accessible. Research, conservation and ecotourism will benefit from easy access to this unique and historic resource.
During the interwar period, British cartographers working in Egypt comprehensively captured the country’s political, economic, and social geography on a series of approximately 500 1:25,000 scale map sheets. Today this collection, and the tremendous cache of information it holds, is hidden: mostly analog, geographically dispersed, and resistant to modern methods of search, discovery, and analysis. Over 22 months, the University of Wisconsin- Madison will assemble, scan, and systematically digitize the collection at the feature level. Each scanned map sheet will be georeferenced and the name, type, exact geographic coordinates, and size of each feature will be digitally captured and indexed. The resultant .tiff files, and shapefiles containing tens of thousands of digitized features, will be made free and fully discoverable (CC0) via the Big Ten Academic Alliance Geoportal (https://geo.btaa.org/). This wealth of material will allow a fuller investigation of Egypt’s economy, politics, and society during a time of historic change.
The Asheville Art Museum requests funding to support a 24-month, single institution project to digitize the Museum’s hidden Black Mountain College (BMC) Collection materials and create the Digital BMC Collection and Interconnective Timeline. This website will provide an object-centric history of the College and the lasting legacy of its influence through interconnected stories of artists, works, ideas, and place. The Museum’s Curatorial staff, fellows, and interns will digitize hundreds of never-before-seen BMC archival documents and literature, works of art, furniture and more. The Digital BMC Collection and Interconnective Timeline will be an important multidisciplinary resource on BMC, providing access to the Museum’s digitized BMC holdings for scholars, students and the public worldwide. At the completion of the project, the Museum will host a webinar symposium that will feature presentations about the newly digitized BMC materials from scholars across the globe and encourage scholastic collaboration across academic disciplines and borders.
Ball State University’s Applied Anthropology Laboratories (BSU/AAL) will execute a 24-month project digitizing over 50 years of archaeological research, making significant Indiana archaeological data readily accessible for the first time. These hidden collections include 18 Archaeological Reports and 110 Reports of Investigations (AR/ROIs) from 1965 to present. AR/ROI reports and maps will be scanned, digitized, and redacted (as necessary); and 4,000 of the most time-sensitive and culturally identifiable artifacts associated with these AR/ROIs will be 3D-scanned and photographed. All reports, maps, and artifact images will be uploaded into The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) with artifact scans shared on Sketchfab. These AR/ROIs cover Indiana’s long occupation history from the earliest (~11,500 B.C.) precontact American Indian land-use and ceremonial behaviors through frontier military engagements, historic American Indian village/settlements, and twentieth century farmsteads. These difficult to access and underutilized collections contain valuable information for the public, American Indian scholars, historians, and ethno-historians throughout the Midwest and nation.
CUNY Television proposes to digitize, preserve, and make accessible select audiovisual collections from a diverse set of organizations within the CUNY system. CUNY Television has become the largest audiovisual archive within the CUNY system and has succeeded at developing and implementing efficient preservation and accessibility workflows. With this project, CUNY TV intends to apply its workflows to collections within select CUNY organizations that do not have active audiovisual preservation programs. These collections had been produced or acquired in order to meet particular educational goals; however their status as obsolete audiovisual objects has limited their potential, ongoing educational impact. These collections represent subjects including education, criminal justice, urban development, and New York’s Puerto Rican communities. These collections are passionate about serving their communities and we feel that drawing together their visionary outreach plans in collaboration to uncover these collections will create a significant educational asset to students, researchers, and the public.
LLMC will digitize and provide vital metadata for an extraordinary compilation on 507 reels entitled Microfilm Collection of Early State Records of the United States, a unique treasure trove of primary source materials for 26 states and territories West of the Appalachians, covering early territorial times to the 1940’s, including: seminal constitutions and debates of constitutional conventions; statutes and compiled laws; journals and debates of the legislative bodies of early territories and states; administrative, executive, and court records; local, county, and city records; records of the North American Indian nations; and newspapers. Originally created by Library of Congress in the 1940s, this significant resource is undiscoverable in its current state and held by only a dozen libraries, where it is at risk due to vinegar syndrome and divestment trends. Digitizing the Records promises to transform the study of American history and is essential to scholars and the general public.
This project aims to uncover, contextualize, and make widely accessible a rare collection of 40,000 employee records of the Calumet & Hecla Copper Mining Company. Building on established workflows within the Michigan Technological University Archives and Geospatial Research Facility, this project will digitize and generate descriptive metadata for a collection that represents the labor experience in the country’s most influential copper region. Next, the team will create rich contextual and spatial linkages through time and space by integrating the employee records into the Copper Country HSDI, an interactive historical atlas funded by the NEH (#1507035) whose public interface is called the Keweenaw Time Traveler (www.keweenawhistory.com). When linked at the household level to historical maps and other geocoded datasets including censuses, these heavily-requested employee records become more discoverable and more valuable for research. Digitized records will also be shared as the Copper Mining Employee Card database on the Archives Preservica-based platform.
The Moravian Archives, Bethlehem (MAB) proposes a 24-month project to digitize approximately 56,119 pages of manuscript records of the Moravian mission province of Labrador, Canada, 1764-1944, and 1,072 pages of printed materials in the Inuttitut language. Project collaborators would include Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN), Nunatsiavut Government (NG), and Moravian Church in Newfoundland and Labrador (MCNL) with project support provided by the National Heritage Digitization Strategy (NHDS).
Moravian missionaries arrived on the shores of Labrador from Europe in 1752, and the records they produced provide valuable insight into the demographics, culture, education and language of Labrador Inuit. The records include correspondence, station reports, mission conference minutes, and Inuttitut resources.
The digitized collections and accompanying metadata will be made accessible in three repositories – at MAB, in MUN’s Digital Archives Initiative (DAI), and in NG’s Collections Repository. The latter reflects a repatriation of archival records to their community of origin.
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