Over 24 months, the Oklahoma State University (OSU) Library proposes to digitize and make discoverable over 64,000 pages of documents relevant to the history of pre-statehood Oklahoma. These Territorial Laws, Reports, and Proceedings (TLRP), Oklahoma Territory Agricultural Extension Publications (OTAEP), and Payne County Land Records (PCLR) have potential to shed light on underdocumented groups, including Native Americans, African Americans, and isolated ethnic communities. Because of the unique context of Oklahoma and Indian Territories vis-à-vis these populations, the information would be of national interest to scholars. The Library will scan these records to archival standards and enhance discoverability by using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software on commercially printed items (TLRP and OTAEP) and by creating extensive page-level metadata for the hand-written PCLR. All material will be assigned metadata at the volume level and made publicly available through OSU’s digital collections interface and HathiTrust or the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

This project builds on an NEH-funded planning grant to survey member collections relating to the efforts of women to assert their rights in the century prior to the ratification of the 19th Amendment, and to develop a prototype interface to expose these collections on a collaborative website. It is led by Temple University Libraries' Special Collections Research Center, the Drexel University College of Medicine Legacy Center, and Swarthmore College and involves seven additional content contributors, listed below. Project participants will digitize and create metadata for their own materials. A project website will harvest OAI-PMH-compliant metadata that will also be DPLA-ready. Participants have paid particular attention to uncovering records by and about women of color, working women, and other marginalized or underrepresented populations.

The Chicago Academy of Sciences / Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum’s (CAS/PNNM) motion picture films document biodiversity from 1925 to 1988, providing a unique mechanism to study ecological change over time. Almost all of the films are original recordings taken during Academy field expeditions across the United States, featuring Midwestern environments and other ecologically important areas within the Great Smoky Mountains, the American Southwest, Louisiana, and Florida. CAS/PNNM films by Academy staff and local naturalists studying abroad also document sensitive ecosystems around the world. Because motion picture film becomes increasingly more fragile over time, digitization of these films is necessary to ensure that access to the information recorded is safely preserved and accessible for scholarly review. CAS/PNNM will contract the Chicago Film Archives to digitize 1,323 films from its collections over a two year period and make the resulting digital media globally available through Internet Archive and Arctos.

New York Public Radio will digitize 2,350 hours of conversations with many influential and provocative thinkers, writers, and artists of the late 20th century. Recorded on 1,700 tapes, (1/4” reel, audio cassette and F-1 Beta) they originally aired on WNYC’s Peabody Award winning program, “The Leonard Lopate Show,” previously known as “Senior Edition” and “New York & Company.” These conversations aired between 1985 – 2002, a 17-year period filled with game-changing events, among them: the ascendancy (now ubiquity) of the internet; communism’s fall; the AIDS epidemic; the rise of global terrorism. The interviews, featuring hundreds of cultural and political figures and public intellectuals, comprise a treasure trove of unique audio primary sources that, when widely digitally accessible, will enhance the historical record, foster scholarly research, and help specialists and the general public make new discoveries about the ideas and work of some of our most important cultural and public figures.

Carnegie Hall proposes a 24-month project to digitize materials in the Programs Collection dating from 1953 to 2017. The project will digitize the final third of the Programs Collection, concluding a multi-year conservation and digitization initiative launched in 2012 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Carnegie Hall Archives’ legacy collections chronicle a rich and varied event history over 125 years. The Programs Collection forms the backbone of the Hall’s legacy collections, which also include architectural drawings, booking ledgers, photographs, audiovisual items, and objects. The breadth of American musical, cultural, and social history is represented in the Programs Collection, including an extraordinary range of artists, repertoire, advertisements, articles, images, and graphics. To date, Carnegie Hall has digitized approximately two thirds of the 600,000 pages in the Programs Collection. The proposed project aims to digitize the remaining content, which totals approximately 202,000 pages and covers 17,062 events.

The Rhode Island Historical Society (RIHS) seeks funding to digitize over 6,400 manuscripts and 46 artifacts pertaining to Rhode Island’s participation in the Revolutionary War. Researchers do not have adequate access to the materials because artifacts are not accessible through our library and all materials are extremely fragile. The documents include references to free and enslaved Africans, Native Americans, and even two women who participated in the War. Due lack of accessibility, knowledge about the people in the documents is limited and scholars are not able to make valuable connections with their research. During this project, the papers and artifacts will be properly cataloged, professionally scanned, and put online where the materials can be searched and made useful to researchers, scholars, teachers, and students. Names of people can be drawn out and lesson plans for schools based on these primary resources can be created.

Astronomical photographic plates covering the entire night sky were taken by astronomer Nancy Houk over 30 years beginning in 1967. In this pioneering research, she used a prism on the front of the telescope and imaged spectra of stars, rather than direct images. Dr. Houk used the spectra to produce the fundamental diagram relating temperatures and luminosities of stars that forms the basis of modern astrophysics. Dr. Houk retired in 2001 and she graciously donated half (2,396 plates) of her plate collection which surveyed the entire southern hemisphere night sky to the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive in 2004. The other half resides in Japan. During this 24 month project we will digitize the plates at 2400 dpi resolution and make the digital images of the plates available online. Making the plates available online opens the opportunity for research into the career and work of Dr. Houk.

Iḷisaġvik College’s Tuzzy Consortium Library and the North Slope Borough’s Iñupiat History, Language, and Culture (IHLC) Department have partnered on this project in order to digitize, transcribe, and translate over 1,600 hours of recordings from the 20th century. The majority of the recordings are in Iñupiaq, which is classified as a threatened language by EGIDS (Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale). The source materials we will digitize through this project are a mixture of audiocassette tapes, VHS tapes, and Umatic tapes. The materials are all from the arctic North Slope area of Alaska, which is the northernmost region in Alaska. With the conclusion of our project, the digitized recordings will be readily accessible to researchers, and be critical for any scholar researching Iñupiaq history and language and/or the history of the North Slope, including undergraduate and graduate students in the University of Alaska’s Alaska Native Studies program.

From January 2018-December 2019, the Indiana University Black Film Center/Archive will digitize the music manuscripts, lyric sheets, project files, unpublished autobiography, recordings, and photographs of composer, Hollywood arranger, and singing star talent coach Phil Moore and provide open online access to Moore’s works. Moore was the first African American musician salaried by a major Hollywood studio and is recognized as a major influence on the careers of Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Marilyn Monroe, and others. In addition to documenting Moore’s life and the creative processes involved with arranging and shaping musical acts from 1938 through 1987, the collection documents the role of music as an entry point into mainstream Hollywood film for Black artists, the early jazz scenes in Seattle and Los Angeles, and African American life and culture in 1920s Portland. It has interdisciplinary appeal to scholars in African American studies, history, American studies, musicology, film, and media studies.

Vision Maker Media (VMM), a Native American nonprofit media organization, will work with 10 cultural institution partners to create high-quality digital copies of analog collections of Native American documentary films, television productions, interviews and raw footage currently archived across institutions in multiple formats. We will digitize over 4,000 films that span several decades. This American Indian and Alaska Native content represents historical and contemporary events and stories from Tribes and Native communities across the United States. The films capture moments of Native lives, tell stories from a Native viewpoint and include some of the most important works of Native American filmmakers in the late 20th century. The collection will be useful to scholars in many fields, Native American communities and the public. Vision Maker Media seeks to make these films publicly accessible as a collection for the first time.

The University of Miami, HistoryMiami, and Duke University will collaborate to digitize 88 boxes of archival materials, 66 boxes of magazine advertisements, and 500 artifacts related to Pan American Airlines - producing approximately 180,000 digital objects - and will work with the Digital Public Library of America to develop a curated portal on aviation. Pan Am attracts scholars from many disciplines including history, women’s studies, international studies, and labor history; this project will allow access to a significant coherent subset of Pan Am’s history. UMiami will digitize material on flight and route development, company histories, and press releases, HistoryMiami artifacts like uniforms, and Duke a significant collection of Pan Am advertisements. These promotional and operational records highlight the complexity and reach of Pan Am, a leader in globalizing aviation and shaping public perceptions of air travel. All material will be available through a DPLA portal to aviation history, a first.

Building on the strong collaborative partnerships and successes of the Medical Heritage Library (MHL), the Center for the History of Medicine (CHM) proposes to digitize 11,540 rare and historically rich pamphlets and print materials held by MHL partners that span the evolution of the field of public health from 1700 to 2000. These works, surfaced from thirty collections held by six of the largest history of medicine collections in the United States, cover health issues populations continue to grapple with today: communicable disease; health education; hygiene; food purity; nutrition; water sanitation; and the impact of alternative medicine on public health.

The Riverside Church in the City of New York (TRC), Library of Congress (LOC), and WGBH Educational Foundation (WGBH) will digitize 3502 ¼-inch open-reel recordings from WRVR-FM’s 1961-1971 broadcasts for addition, with metadata, to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB). The nominated collection reflects WRVR’s culturally significant non-commercial programming, including interviews, speeches, and musical interpretations on matters like civil rights, war, and fine arts, from laypersons to famed scholars, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Pete Seeger. The project will preserve recordings outside their current time-sensitive medium, making 4060 hours of audio available. It will enhance study in many disciplines, including theology/religion, political science, and communications, especially related to American Christianity, homiletics, progressive responses to the Civil Rights movement, contemporary issues of race and sexuality, cultural impact of the 1960s, and public radio as a tool for cultural engagement and social media precursor.

Tulane’s Latin American Library proposes a two-year project to digitize 36 of the 135 radio soap operas from the Louis J. Boeri and Minín Bujones Boeri Collection of Cuban American Radionovelas. The audio recording masters are contained on 8,934 reel to reel tapes that were produced by Miami-based America’s Productions, Inc. between 1963 and 1970. These programs were transmitted to over 200 radio stations in Latin America and Spain, to U.S. Spanish-language stations, and to the U.S. government. With scripts penned by acclaimed Cuban and Mexican writers, the broadcasts included soap operas, comedies, advice programs, biblical dramas, mysteries, spy stories, and variety shows. The digitized radionovelas will be freely available worldwide as a collection within the Tulane University Digital Library and will afford a unique resource for the study of the political, cultural, and commercial ties between the United States and Cuba via public broadcasting during the pivotal Cold War.

The University of Houston Libraries proposes a 6-month project to outsource the digitization of 118 16mm films from the KUHT Collection. KUHT-TV began broadcasting from the University of Houston in 1953 under one of the country’s first educational non-profit licenses airing both for-credit "telecourses" and enriching programs aimed at a general audience. The films proposed for digitization represent some KUHT's earliest productions and are fledgling examples educational and public television.

The Edge of Texas radio program aired weekly for 20 years beginning in 1984 on public radio in El Paso. The program presented stories of the Southwest with hosts, writers, and narrators Alex and Patti Apostolides. The radio show consisted of scripted programs as well as interviews with notable people. Stories of the Southwest recounted tales such as Indian myths, historical events, and folklore. Other common subjects included natural history and archeology. The program provided both entertainment and educational content while encouraging community involvement. In the interviews, museum directors, artists, politicians, musicians, and writers spoke about life in the borderlands. The first fifteen years of program recordings are saved on 783 7-inch reel-to-reel magnetic audiotapes to be reformatted, described, and made available online. Improved access to this collection would benefit research in local history, border studies, anthropology, literature, and music, among other subjects.

The 10th Mountain Division Resource Center oral history collection at the Denver Public Library (DPL) consists of 246 audio and audiovisual recordings of interviews with World War II veterans who served with the 10th Mountain Division. These recordings are all at risk of degradation or loss due to their age and the scarcity of equipment necessary to access them. Because many of the veterans interviewed have since passed away, these recordings are irreplaceable. These are unique among first hand accounts of World War II as “the 10th” transformed winter mountain warfare and returned home to create the ski industry. Currently the only means to utilize these resources is to visit DPL in person or to purchase a copy. DPL proposes to digitize these interviews, not only to ensure their long-term preservation, but to be able to offer them for free public use online to anyone, anywhere.

Project to reformat 173 reel to reel tapes containing circa 627 musical works presented on recitals by the University at Buffalo's Creative Associates, 1964-1980. The Associates were members of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, established by Lukas Foss and Allen Sapp in 1964. These recitals were the concerts the Associates programmed themselves as supplements to the Center-scheduled concerts. As such they represent the musical interests of the Associates ranging from early music to contemporaneous music. Many performances of contemporary works were either performed by their respective composers or under their direction. Close to 20 premieres are included. The roster of performers and composers is exceptional. It represents a high number of luminaries of contemporary music of the period, including Crumb, Berio, Wuorinen, Carter, Copland, Bussotti, Scelsi, Feldman, Cage, as well as lesser-known figures whose representation here may be even more unique.

The Walker Art Center proposes to digitize 138 recordings of artistic presentations from 1953 to 2006. This collection includes performances, interviews, and dialogues with internationally recognized artists in a variety of fields including painting, sculpture, dance, literature, film, music, theater, design, and architecture. The formats to be digitized and preserved include ½” open reel video tapes, ¾” umatic videotapes, Digital Audio Tapes (DAT), and Soundscriber transcription discs. The proposed recordings will impact scholarship in the artistic disciplines noted above, and will prove to be assets for research on urban planning, community engagement, and the AIDS epidemic. This project is part of a larger goal to digitize the full Walker Archives, which has been identified as a priority in the institution’s strategic planning process for Fiscal Years 2018-2021. The Walker will make digitized archival resources available online as part of the redesigned walkerart.org.

The Language & Life Project (LLP) and the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project (SLAAP), partnering with The MediaPreserve will reformat 728 at-risk, rare audio interviews created for a foundational study on social stratification in American English (1966-67), “The Detroit Dialect Study”. The interviews represent speakers from a variety of ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds, and the oral history style of the sociolinguistic interview covers content of interest to a wide array of researchers and the public such as politics, education, cultural norms and traditions. Further, a subset of the interviews are of critical importance to the study of African American Language, allowing researchers to gain a fuller understanding of its earlier development in urban contexts using modern methods of analysis. The digitized corpus will be incorporated into a larger collection via SLAAP, an audio archive that will enable access to and individual as well as collaborative analysis of the data.

The National Public Broadcasting Archives (NPBA) will reformat at-risk, rare audio recordings (600 open-reel tapes, estimated 300 hours, dating 1965-1984) from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB) Collection. The NFCB is a national grass-roots, non-profit organization which has served non-commercial community-based radio stations since 1975. Their mission includes assisting and advocating for the successful operation and funding of local stations, facilitating the production of innovative programming from diverse sources, and promoting the participation of minorities and women at all levels of public broadcasting. The audio recordings in this project include ethnographies of music cultures throughout the world, programs on social and cultural issues in the U.S. and speeches from feminist and African-American activists. These digitized recordings, made available via UMD Libraries’ Digital Collections repository, will be invaluable to international researchers from a wide range of disciplines including ethnomusicology, anthropology, media studies, sociology, political science, African-American history, and women’s studies.

The material for this project includes 251 video and audio recordings comprised of historic documentation and research of an endangered population of orcas, interviews and explanations by original researchers, and documentation of programs implemented by the museum to promote the stewardship of whales. The recordings are at risk because of their format and storage environment. Their contents are valuable to regional, national and international researchers and educators, community members, and to efforts to conserve and protect our oceans.

We plan to digitize Fort Sill Chiricahua/Warm Springs Apache sound collections. This community is descended from the Apache prisoners of war seized with Geronimo in 1886. Collections highlight the music and oral history of Chihene, or Warm Springs Apache youth living in Sierra Madre camps during 1882s so-called “Loco Outbreak,” including ancestors of the Haozous, Gooday, and Kawaykla families. Their recordings constitute the cultural heritage of Geronimo’s child soldiers. Fort Sill Apache recordings help scholars understand the consequences of the Loco Outbreak on Warm Springs Apache youth; their consolidation as prisoners of war alongside Nednai captors; as well as their re-assertion of Warm Springs consciousness when released from imprisonment in 1913. Including War and Mountain Spirit Dance songs dating from 19th-century southwestern warfare (1881-1886) and social dance songs and Christian hymnody dating from Apache prisoner of war exile and imprisonment (1886-1914), this is a collection of great historical significance.

The L. Douglas Wilder Library proposes to reformat recordings at-risk from the L. Douglas Wilder Collection. This collection includes 716 audio cassette tapes spanning from 1995-2001 and are primarily recordings of Wilder's popular WRVA radio talk show. Other tapes include public service announcements, campaign ads, press conferences and national news interviews. The collection also includes 370 VHS video tapes and 16 open reel recording tapes which spans the years 1983-2001. They include gubernatorial debates between Wilder and Marshall Coleman, political advertisements, public service announcements, Wilder’s inauguration ceremony, the State of the Commonwealth addresses, and national news show interviews. The project will contribute to research and scholarship as the first elected African American Governor in the United States. The Archives uses Eloquent Archives Management System to house the University’s digital assets, which will store digital content created through the project to make accessible to researchers following current copyright restrictions.

The project comprises digitizing, accessioning, and cataloging the Locus Audio Archive, with corresponding metadata for each digital file, with the goal of publishing a complete catalog online through the Locus website and preserving these valuable interviews on digital media before their current microcassette storage deteriorates beyond accessibility. With approximately 491 microcassette tapes containing 536 interviews, the collection offers an audio historical record of the genre’s growth over the last 60 years, emphasizing the lives of the authors, editors, and publishers of the works themselves. As the study of these fields burgeons in the academy, these otherwise unavailable audio interviews will provide a more complete understanding of the history of speculative fiction and the individuals who created it -- lauded and respected authors and editors such as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tanith Lee, Gene Wolfe, and more.