Occidental College and its partners propose to digitize an interrelated cross section of an urban community's archival record -- neighborhood newspapers, photographic collections, and school publications -- as part of a larger long-term interdisciplinary and interinstitutional scholarly research project focusing on social and demographic changes within the nation's second largest metropolis. These documents uniquely illuminate the social, cultural, and intellectual history of a working class, ethnically diverse urban district experiencing transformations that would eventually affect many other American cities during the twentieth century. In the process, we seek not only to make previously inaccessible documents available to scholars and the public for the first time through digitization, but to transform the social value of archival materials more generally by modeling innovative techniques of computational historiography that promise to advance scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences by identifying trends, patterns of association, and political activism within previously neglected communities.

The University of Chicago Library proposes a 2-year project to digitize our collection of 1,175 monograph and serial titles from the University's Microform Projects in Ottoman, Persian, and Arabic. The collection includes materials spanning the dates 1734-1997, though the bulk are fragile materials from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This collection offers a rich resource for scholars in a broad range of academic disciplines, from social, intellectual, and political history through literature, religion, and philosophy, relating to the Arab World, Iran, North Africa, and all the areas included within the former Ottoman empire. The project will utilize the existing preservation-quality microform surrogates to create an efficient and cost-effective digitization workflow. Both digitization and cataloging will be done by vendors and staff will be hired locally to process the resulting files. The digital files will be made available through records in OCLC, the Library's catalog, and HathiTrust.

The Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) proposes a two-year project to provide public access to our Spoken Word Collection through digitization. This unique collection of oral histories, radio programs, speeches, interviews, panel discussions, and other types of spoken word recordings, reflects the diversity of lesbian and feminist communities, not just a selection of well-known women. Consisting of 3,000 audio cassette tapes, the collection includes recordings from the United States and Canada from the early 1970s to present day. We began digitizing our collection in 2010 working with Dr. Anthony Cocciolo and his students at Pratt School of Information and with interns and volunteers at LHA. Our proposed project would make our entire collection of spoken word recordings accessible online and be an incredible contribution, both providing researchers and the general public with material heretofore unavailable and in many cases, completely unknown and giving women access to their cultural heritage.

This 36-month project will be undertaken by the Dayton Society of Natural History in collaboration with the Applied Anthropology Laboratories of the Department of Anthropology at Ball State University. The project will create an online database of organic tools excavated from the prehistoric SunWatch site (a National Historic Landmark) and related sites. Objects will be 3D scanned and photographed to create a digital comparative collection of a class of ubiquitous artifacts that have been ignored within most American archaeology. There is a lack of access to organic tool collections because few are large, typologically diverse, or well-provenienced. Digitization is essential for capturing the form of these fragile and inherently three-dimensional objects and sharing content with geographically dispersed scholars, including native scholars. Similar tools were used by historic and pre-contact Native American groups throughout the Eastern Woodlands and represent common patterns of subsistence and economy of broad scholarly interest.

The purpose of this project is to digitize 17,000 direct and spectral astronomical survey plates taken from 1941-1990 as part of sky surveys by astronomers using the Case Western Reserve University's Burrell Schmidt telescope. The telescope used for the photography was initially located near Cleveland, OH, and was part of early efforts in establishing astrophysics of planets, stars, nebulae, and galaxies. The collection now resides at the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive (APDA) on the campus of the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) in Western North Carolina.

Richard J. Daley (Chicago mayor, 1955-1976) presided over the United States' second largest city during a time of unprecedented economic and social change. Daley wielded national influence as a key figure in the U.S. Democratic Party, as a spokesperson and advocate for urban policy initiatives, and as a confidant to congresspersons, senators, and presidents. The University of Illinois at Chicago will digitize and place online approximately 11,100 photographic and other images from two archival collections that pertain to the mayor's life. These collections are the Richard J. Daley Collection and the László Kondor Photograph Collection. The project will digitize the full range of photographs from each collection, and it will allow researchers to easily access and search images from the mayor's life and career. Also included is a small number of photos from before and after Daley's life.

The proposed project would digitize documentary photographs, negatives, and slides of objects within the San Diego Museum of Man (SDMoM) collections. These images were produced by SDMoM curatorial staff between the years 1959-1999, as part of systemic cataloging efforts. While SDMoM moved to an electronic collections database in 2000, the aforementioned images are still largely inaccessible to the public and to Museum staff. By digitizing these images, we can connect them to the Object Records they relate to, and add significant value to our understanding of the objects. Connecting the documentary image collection and the cataloged object collection will finalize links that were always intended but lost, as we made the leap to digital databases and digital imaging. SDMoM will work to make these digitized images publicly accessible through the design and implementation of an Online Collections Portal. This will make our collections widely available online to the general public.

The Frances Willard Historical Association (FWHA) proposes a one-year project to digitize and provide free, searchable online access to seventy years (over 58,000 pages) of the Union Signal, the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union's official newspaper. From 1883 to 1953, the newspaper provided weekly, comprehensive coverage not only of the temperance/prohibition movement, but also of national and international social issues, including women's rights, health, politics, and education. Today, for most scholars—especially those outside the United States—access to the newspaper is either nonexistent or limited to incomplete, unindexed volumes in hard-copy or on microfilm. For this project, the vendor, Northern Micrographics, will digitize the FWHA's complete volumes of the Union Signal and make the searchable files available via the open-source document-management system ResCartaWeb, linked from the FWHA's website. The online Union Signal will give educators, students, and researchers--in an increasing range of disciplines--access to a significant, underused resource.

This project involves digitizing a total of 16,073 documents and 783 photographs associated with Idaho's Kooskia Internment Camp, a World War II internment camp that imprisoned a predominantly first generation Japanese male population. The Kooskia Internment Camp held 265 prisoners between May 1943 and May 1945, and was unique in that it was one of the few Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) internment camps during World War II. INS camps were designated to incarcerate individuals deemed "enemy aliens" who posed a threat to the United States during the war. Materials to be digitized include a diary written by one of the prisoners, "memory maps" drawn by camp employees, internee FBI files, artifact catalog records, maps, and documentation from excavations at the Kooskia Internment Camp, photographs, censored and uncensored letters written by prisoners, correspondence written by prison guards and officials, and internee artwork.

Hidden Experiences of the Civil War: A Collaboration between the American Civil War Museum (ACWM) and the Virginia Historical Society (VHS) will unite the unparalleled manuscript collections of the ACWM with the expertise and capacity of the VHS to offer scholars in Civil War history, gender studies, African-American studies, labor history, and related disciplines access to more than 50,000 items depicting experiences of soldiers and civilians, enslaved and free African-Americans, and women between 1835-1889. From diaries and correspondence to military papers and impressment certificates for slaves, this collection offers insight into complex challenges faced at war and at home. ACWM historians and VHS archivists anticipate that digitizing these materials will illuminate connections and trends that would have lain hidden without digital cataloging. The project reinforces ACWM's mission to share a spectrum of Civil War experiences and will be a cornerstone of the new Civil War Research Center at the VHS.

This project will digitize a major archival collection pertaining to Sr. M. Madeleva Wolff, C.S.C. (1887-1964), president of Saint Mary's College, South Bend, IN, 1934-1961, and housed at Saint Mary's. Wolff was a poet, scholar, pioneer in women's higher education, and correspondent of major American figures including Helen Hayes, Tom Dooley, Thomas Merton, Clare Boothe Luce, and Conrad Hilton. Wolff's archives include letters, papers, published writings, photographs, video, audio, and memorabilia ranging from her student days at Saint Mary's to her time as faculty member and president. In collaboration with the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, we will digitize the collection; construct a research website with full access; and construct a curated online exhibit. We intend to provide global digital access to scholars of history, gender, education policy, and more, while also building robust links to existing search portals.

The G. Robert Vincent Voice Library at Michigan State University will digitize, create linked metadata, and disseminate sound recordings from two collections with holdings of local broadcasts made from 1945-1955 and 1989-1996. These collections together comprise nearly 750 hours of unique analog recordings on 16" transcription discs and various forms of audio tape, and they provide access to previously hidden state and local histories. The recordings primarily cover Michigan issues, for example efforts to enact affirmative action policies in the Kalamazoo Police Department, but they also provide a portal through which to understand national issues from a Michigan perspective, for example the 1992 presidential campaign. This project is guided by the belief that recorded sound allows us to understand the past not just intellectually but also emotionally. In the inflections and accents of human voices, these historic radio broadcasts tell a story that cannot be conveyed by the written word.

NPR's Research, Archives & Data Strategy (RAD) team, in collaboration with the University of Maryland (UMD), will digitize, preserve and provide access to the first twelve years of NPR's national radio newsmagazine, 'All Things Considered.' Featuring the sounds and voices from the most important events, people and stories of its time, 'All Things Considered' is an invaluable primary source for scholarly research. During the 32 month project, RAD will digitally reformat almost 6,000 hours of audio currently stored on obsolete open reel tape. The digitized audio will be ingested into NPR's searchable database, accessible to the public through the University of Maryland. Over 60,000 metadata records will be integrated with the University of Maryland Libraries Online Catalog and WorldCat for enhanced discovery. A curated selection of historically significant stories will be shared with the public on NPR.org and through social media.

The Buffalo Bill Center of the West's McCracken Research Library (MRL), in collaboration with Yellowstone National Park's Heritage and Research Center (YHRC), will digitize and make widely available a vast collection of material from their respective repositories. The collections include maps, atlases, scientific papers, pamphlets, souvenirs, photographs, journals, films, and other rich ephemera from Yellowstone National Park. This iconic region, and the perception people have of it, has served to fire imaginations all over the world. The thirty-month project will create free and open access to collections that will serve not only scholars and researchers in biology, geology, popular culture, and environmental and American history, but members of the general public, who remain enchanted by one of the last intact ecosystems in the lower forty-eight states.

The Archives & Special Collections department at the Dean B. Ellis Library at Arkansas State University proposes a twenty-four month project to digitize 215 reels of 16mm color film with sound to create 6450+ individual files of KAIT 8 television news footage. Access copies of these records will become part of an online collection that is self-hosted on the Dean B. Ellis library's instance of DSpace. These records, and their accompanying metadata, will be made discoverable through the library's catalog, OCLC (including ArchiveGrid and WorldCat), and internet search engines. This audiovisual collection is the only one of its kind for northeast Arkansas and southeast Missouri and the film reels have been inaccessible for research and instruction due to physically unplayable film reels and an unavailable searchable index of metadata and digital surrogates.

The Baruch College Newman Library Archives seeks to spend 24 months digitizing much of the long-overlooked papers of Luther Halsey Gulick III (1892-1993), called the leading reformer of the 20th Century. From the groundbreaking Bureau of Municipal Research and Institute of Public Administration, Gulick put his managerial genius at the service of good government, overthrowing political bosses, reorganizing Franklin Roosevelt's White House, mobilizing production for WWII, securing the peace, and modernizing the nation's municipalities. The hundreds of boxes of his manuscripts, speeches, reports, photographs, maps, charts, and ephemera constitute the unique archive of a visionary who believed in the power of government to do good and pioneered the science and art of implementing policy -- a vital message today. It significantly complements collections at Presidential libraries and other leading repositories, and will make historically critical material easily accessible for the first time to our School of Public Affairs and scholars.

Charles L. Freer, founder of the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art, was a shrewd businessman, world traveler, and visionary collector. Freer's correspondence with art collectors and dealers, scholars, artists, and others provides an extraordinary account of the formation of aesthetic judgments of Asian art that still resonate today. This two-year project will digitize and catalog 31,000 pages of Freer's correspondence and purchase records, which will be transcribed and linked to art objects in Freer's collection. Records will be publicly accessible through the Smithsonian Collections Search Center where searches will also locate related material at other Smithsonian museums. Researchers will be able to trace Freer's purchases, his influences and how he influenced others. For scholars of the new discipline, the history of art collections, Freer's papers will provide critical information unavailable before. Others will find revelations about the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era and our evolving engagement with Asia.

The University of Texas Libraries (UTL) will digitize 15,890 pages from Southern Architect and Building News (SABN). UTL holds 225 issues published between 1892-1931. The content of SABN consists of essays, articles, editorials, illustrations, advertisements, and building records. All issues held by UTL will be digitized and processed in house. UTL will build an Islandora/Fedora repository, which will provide access to all of the digitized texts and associated metadata, including content which is currently restricted by copyright. UTL will contribute all digitized texts and metadata to the HathiTrust, which will provide full-text discoverability while still restricting access to material under copyright. All metadata for the digitized texts will be made openly available through the HathiTrust, the Digital Public Library of America, the Internet Archive, the Getty Research Portal. Additionally, the Islandora/Fedora repository will provide long-term sustainability and will be constructed to allow for future enhancements to the metadata.

Swem Library is working with the Internet Archive to digitize, perform optical character recognition (OCR), and make freely available online for research the issues of Cash Box, a weekly magazine published from 1942 through 1996 for the music and coin-operated machine industries in the United States and elsewhere. Cash Box is an important and internationally significant resource for the study of music history and popular culture. Acquired directly from the publisher along with the copyright, Swem Library's set of issues is by far the most complete in existence. Although WorldCat indicates that sixty libraries worldwide have copies of Cash Box, most of them have limited runs. This project will digitize 190,000 pages and make them available online through both the William & Mary Digital Archive and the Internet Archive. OCR will allow for keyword searching by individual issue or across issues.

Folklorist, professor of English, and Duke University administrator Frank Clyde Brown collected folk songs and ballads throughout North Carolina in the 1920s and 1930s. Housed at Duke University's David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the collection of 1,367 songs on 136 wax cylinders and instantaneous discs is an important primary document of American folk song in the early 20th century. Many of the songs are published in volumes two through five of The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, a posthumous and comprehensive collection of Brown's folklore research, published between 1952 and 1964. However, the original recordings, fragile and difficult to play back, have never been widely accessible. "All Day Singing" will digitize the original field recordings using the Northeast Document Conservation Center's IRENE 2D and 3D imaging system, describe the content of the recordings based on Brown's field notes, and make the recordings available online.

The Smithsonian, Internet Archive, Missouri Botanical Garden Raven Library, American Museum of Natural History, Yale Peabody Museum, Harvard University Herbaria Botany Libraries, Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology Mayr Library, UC Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, New York Botanical Garden Mertz Library, and Field Museum, seek to increase accessibility to original scientific documentation through the digitization of entire collections of archival field notes. Currently, field notes from related persons and expeditions are scattered across institutions, inaccessible to any but the determined researcher. By enabling the complete, online collocation of collections, the Project will significantly improve research opportunities for scholars with interests as diverse as climate change, evolution, history of science, and women and minorities in science. The Project will coordinate work to digitize field notes, assign metadata, and publish the field notes online through the Biodiversity Heritage Library and Internet Archive, with an emphasis on quality, quantity, and closely related content.

The Young Women's Christian Association of the USA (YWCA) Digitization and Access Project will digitize and make available online 379 reels of microfilmed YWCA records, the primary YWCA serials, and YWCA photographs currently held as part of the YWCA of the U.S.A. Records at Smith College Special Collections. The project consists of three phases over two years 2016-2018: (1) digitization of the content, (2) building robust metadata, and (3) public release, promotion, and access. The records addressed by this project span from 1869-1970 and are fully processed, but locked in physical form and therefore not accessible to the widest possible audience. This popular and rich content represents transnational history, as well as the intersections of race, gender, geography, immigration, socio-cultural politics, and U.S. national policy. An organization that advanced equality and the highest principles of democracy, the YWCA records should likewise be broadly available to the public.

The Revealing Visual Culture project will create digital images and supporting metadata for 150,000 modern periodical illustration tear sheets contained in the Walt Reed Illustration Archive at Washington University Libraries. The tear sheets -from over 200 illustrated periodical publications dating from the 1860s to the 1990s - represent the largest known collection in the world. Featuring illustrations from magazine covers, fiction stories, advertisements, news and information articles, and visual essays, the tear sheets offer a rich resource for scholarly investigation in multiple fields. During the two-year project, an outside vendor will create digital files and initial metadata, and Washington University Libraries staff will supervise student assistants to enhance the metadata and perform quality control. The resulting image database will be searchable by illustrators, publication titles, subject matter, date and content. We will provide complete public access to high-resolution images and metadata through Artstor's Shared Shelf Commons.

The Erie Canal Museum in collaboration with the Canal Society of New York State will digitize images from their collections of historic photographic glass and film negatives. Corresponding metadata for each image will be provided. All will be placed online following the model established under a 2014 Hidden Collections project that was also a collaboration of these two groups. The effort will complete the digitization of these most inaccessible formats and create a unique and comprehensive visual archive on the history of New York State's Erie Canal. The Erie Canal Museum's holdings consist of approximately 200 glass negatives from several individual collections dating to the 1890s, largely 4" by 5". The Canal Society's contribution comes from its yet-to-be digitized 5,200 medium-format film negatives by Albert Gayer (1897-1976) of Schenectady, NY, a noted transportation historian and photographer.

New England's Hidden Histories is a program of the Congregational Library & Archives (CLA) designed to provide free public access to colonial and early American church records. These documents, an unparalleled source of information about ordinary people and the practices they developed to organize, govern, and give meaning to their daily lives, are used by researchers across a range of disciplines -- from genealogy and history to epidemiology and orthography. Since 2005 the CLA has been locating and retrieving these documents from church attics and basements, digitizing them, and making them available on our website. We seek to build our existing digital collection with records newly gathered and owned by the Library as well as with records in the holdings of three of our many institutional partners, the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, the Phillips Library in Salem and the Archive of the Connecticut Conference of the UCC.