The Marian Anderson Papers ranks among the most important archival collections in the Kislak Center for Special Collections. Although the archive is consulted regularly, patrons must travel to Philadelphia to view the physical contents of the vast majority of documents in the archive. A very small percentage of this rich resource has been digitized. Recognized as one of the 20th century’s greatest musical performers, Anderson, an African American, was born in Philadelphia (1897-1993), where she is revered and memorialized. We propose to digitize five series. This includes her private sound recordings; audio interviews (and transcripts); recital programs; diaries; and scrapbooks. Once digitized, these materials will enable researchers to explore the geographical extent of her musical career; study her repertoire; gain a deeper understanding of the blind prejudice she endured; and, despite her trials marvel at her courage, reception and fame as she emerged as the Artist on the world stage.

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (RIAS) and its Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, along with associated faculty in History, Government, American Studies and African and African-American Studies, and in collaboration with the Massachusetts State Archives and the Harvard College Library, will conduct a two-year project to (1) catalog and digitize women’s rights petitions sent to the Massachusetts state legislature from 1619 to 1925 (estimated number between 2,500 and 2,800); (2) conduct collaborative research on these petitions in the fields of women’s history, literature, and American legal and political history; and (3) join the records with data on anti-slavery and Native American petitions sent to the Massachusetts state legislature assembled from previous grants as part of an open-access website where the petition images and data can be used by teachers, researchers, citizens, genealogists, and the public at large for further research.

The WGBH Health Care Digitization Project (the “Project”) will digitize, preserve and make accessible program materials from The AIDS Quarterly and The Health Quarterly series via WGBH’s American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) and Open Vault websites. Both series were magazine-style documentaries broadcast on public television between 1988-1993. The AIDS Quarterly (six programs) covered the AIDS epidemic in depth; The Health Quarterly (eight programs) reported more broadly on US healthcare. The collection also includes health-related materials produced by WGBH for the series NOVA, the standalone documentary AIDS Research: The Story So Far, and related stories from WGBH’s Ten O’Clock News.  Materials from all series exist on obsolete videotape formats including ¾”,  1”, Betacam and film.  The collection contains rich source material including interviews with doctors, patients, policy experts, activists, academics, government officials and congressional representatives. WGBH will create transcripts of all materials containing speech when transcripts do not already exist.

Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Libraries will digitize 61 videotapes held in the RIT/NTID DSA that document the ASL literature movement in Rochester from 1970-1999. These videotapes will represent the largest collection of rare U.S. ASL Literature to be made publicly accessible. Preservation digital copies will be made and stored, and access digital copies provided for use by scholars and the general public.This collection will be universally accessible: it will be captioned, voiced, transcribed and/or signed. The once “hidden” work of this pioneering and under-represented group will be made public for the first time, broadening access to the cultural heritage of this diverse group little known outside of the Deaf community and enriching interdisciplinary studies in linguistics, poetry, performing arts, and cinema. Finally, this project can shape a new understanding of the libraries’ role in modeling best practices for accessible sharing of online videos.

The San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI)’s project will digitize and make widely available online its extensive Exhibitions and Public Programs Archival Collections—which include a vast store of unique primary source materials—and audio and video recordings of decades of public programs. The collections represent a critical primary source for the emergence of modern and contemporary art history and provide a rich resource for scholars in a range of disciplines, from art and art history to politics, literature, architecture, history, geography, and many others. Digitization is an essential component of our larger goal of making these important collections easily found and accessible for a broad range of researchers—both scholarly and casual—throughout the world. We will make them available on the SFAI website and through the online archives platform CollectiveAccess. We request funding for the 24-month second phase of the project, launched in 2016 with initial funding from the IMLS.

“Oversized and Underexposed” is a collaboration between the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) and the Archives of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. It is designed to expand access to La MaMa’s unique collections of oversized posters and photographs and to pilot an affordable digitization service model for the New York Metropolitan region. This 18 month collaborative project has three principle goals. First, to digitize and expand access to a unique collection of materials documenting the history of New York City’s Off-Off-Broadway movement; Second, to pilot and launch METRO’s large format digitization services, which will offer access to an affordable set of tools and workflows for METRO’s community of more than 250 collecting organizations; Third, to offer a series of public programs and events exploring the history and graphic styles of La MaMa’s posters and photographs in the context of our current social and political climate.

The Amistad Research Center seeks to digitize the raw outtake film footage for the civil-rights-era documentary film, Black Natchez (1967) and the unfinished sequel film. The film, produced by filmmakers Ed Pincus and David Neuman, charts early attempts to organize and register Black voters and the formation of the self-defense group Deacons for Defense and Justice in Natchez, Mississippi in 1965. The filmmakers returned to Natchez in 1967 following the murder of Wharlest Jackson, the treasurer of the Natchez branch of the NAACP, to document Jackson’s funeral and the aftermath of his murder. Footage is shot cinéma vérité style, with the filmmakers acting as “fly-on-the-wall” observers to the action. This project will digitize and provide access to approximately ninety hours of rare black and white 16mm footage of the African American community in Natchez at the height of violence, racial tensions, and the fight for civil rights during the 1960s.

Funding for Eastern Bloc Borderlands: Digitizing Russian Military Topographic Maps of Eastern Europe, 1883-1947 will support the digitization, cataloging, and georeferencing of 4,000+ largely Soviet-era maps that were originally captured by the Germans during World War II, then Americans, and ultimately deposited in the Library of Congress (LC). The Indiana University Libraries (IUL) holds duplicates of this map series based on a cataloging exchange arrangement between IUL and LC. The Russian Military Topographic Map Collection covers areas of Eastern Europe that were greatly impacted by World War II, and were of strategic importance to Russia/Soviet Union. Areas featured, such as Crimea, are critical in international relations today. These maps also provide a glimpse of pre-war Eastern Europe, with villages and settlements that in some cases no longer exist. Increasing patron demand from IU and scholars abroad and preservation concerns provided the impetus for this year-long digitization project.

Nearly everything we know about the world ocean prior to the satellite era can be linked to a single document type: the ship’s logbook. Other primary documents, including muster rolls, field note books, photographs and artwork, often depend on this link for context and interpretation. This project will digitize the logbooks and muster rolls of U.S. naval vessels (1861-1879), and selected related assets between 1801 and 1940. Beyond imaging, we recover geospatial reference, weather and ocean data, and other historical information through Old Weather, our citizen-science program. These data will be suitable for computationally intensive retrospective analysis (reanalysis) systems and for enhancing the discoverability and application of information from the logbooks. Images and data will be integrated into existing national and international data infrastructure. Large-scale manuscript-to-digital data conversion has great potential to foster new scientific and historical understanding and provides enhanced access to our shared maritime and cultural heritage.

The University of Chicago Library proposes a 2-year project to digitize a collection of 1,175 monograph and serial titles from our Microform Projects in Ottoman, Persian, and Arabic. This collection offers a rich resource for scholars in a broad range of academic disciplines, including social, intellectual, and political history, literature, religion, and philosophy, relating to the Arab World, Iran, North Africa, and the areas included within the former Ottoman Empire. Materials date from 1734–1997, though the bulk are fragile materials from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The project will utilize the existing preservation-quality microform surrogates to create an efficient and cost-effective digitization workflow and will consult with a Faculty Advisory Group to ensure we meet scholarly needs. Digitization and cataloging will be done by vendors, local staff will process the resulting files. The digital files will be made available through records in OCLC, the Library’s catalog, and HathiTrust.

Over the course of 30 months, this joint initiative between Emerson College, Marshall University, University of Iowa, and University of Washington will digitize and make accessible our institutions unique and complementary vaudeville collections. We will create a digital representation of vaudeville materials in select academic institutions throughout the United States. Content will be hosted locally through our respective institutions’ digital repositories and presented/contextualized through an aggregated online portal. From the initial registration of an act with popular vaudeville registries, to the advertisement/payment of a performer, to ephemera collected to add to the historical record of vaudeville in America, our proposed collaboration will track the life cycle of vaudeville and offers the modern scholar an unprecedented level of access to vaudeville materials from disparate geographic locations.

This project proposes to migrate a valuable collection of optical astronomy data currently stored on obsolete magnetic tapes into a new online repository called Astrolabe, where it will be widely accessible for further research, follow-up to new scientific observations, and linking to corresponding scholarly publications through emerging paradigms for open data and open science. Since the equipment needed to read these tapes is becoming obsolete, and since the tapes themselves are not being curated for long-term preservation, the data are in danger of being lost forever. As a long-lived scholarly institution serving the United States astronomy community, American Astronomical Society (AAS) is committed to providing astronomers with innovative services in a spirit of openness and collaboration. AAS will oversee the effort to rescue this collection of data in support of the needs of the community, and to further contribute to development of the Astrolabe system for astronomical research.

The Living Bali project will digitize and create metadata for 39,000 slides and 4,100 photographs in the Fred Eiseman Collection on Bali from the world renowned Echols Collection on Southeast Asia at Cornell University Library and contextualize these items through the BASAbali wiki project. This represents a significant addition to the corpus of online material available to researchers. These images have a particular focus on the interaction of the Balinese people with their environment. The images will be connected to the BASAbali community wiki project, providing necessary context and a link to current practices. Indonesia plays a significant role in Southeast Asia and the larger worldin part because of the environmental, religious and cultural diversity of Bali. This project will greatly enhance our understanding of Bali, Indonesia and our larger world.

Recognizing the continued and ongoing need to provide access to field notes and manuscript collections documenting biodiversity, the BHL Field Notes Project (funded by CLIR, 2015) is evolving into the BHL Field Notes Program. This phase (June 2018-May 2020) includes continued participation from Smithsonian; Internet Archive; American Museum of Natural History; Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, Library; Missouri Botanical Garden, Library; and welcomes new partners in Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University Library and Archivesand Natural History Museum Los Angeles County. During this phase we will digitize, assign metadata, and publish field notes online through the BHL and Internet Archive, which in turn will support scholars of diverse disciplines including climate change, evolution, history of science, and women and minorities in science. Additionally, we’ll develop a method to import pre-existing transcriptions into BHL for enhanced discoverability and accessibility to an even wider audience.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign proposes to digitize 320,000 pages of rare Italian imprints dating from the 16th through 19th centuries from the historically significant Cavagna Collection. This work builds on the CLIR-funded “Cataloging Cavagna” project (2015 – 2017), which has been progressing toward its goal of cataloging some 20,000 imprints using the innovative “Quick and Clean Rare Book Cataloging” model. Just as this project demonstrated a new approach for efficient and accurate rare book cataloging, “Digitizing Cavagna” will do the same for digitization by making high quality metadata and page images discoverable in the HathiTrust Digital Library. As such, “Digitizing Cavagna” will serve as a model for the digitization of rare imprints, while also making a rich collection accessible to scholars in multiple fields, including but not limited to Italian history, literature, art, theatre, law, economics, and religion.

In the 1960's, marine exploration and cruise sampling lacked systematic repetition for evaluating species life history and ecology. Overfishing in the Gulf of Mexico was showing early signs of future collapse so the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, formerly the Marine Research Laboratory, ventured to obtain extensive biological data at sixteen stations of various depths on the Gulf of Mexico continental shelf. The sampling program was one of a kind for its systematic approach; the hourglass pattern for inshore and offshore stations launched the Hourglass Cruise program. This project proposes to 3D scan and photographically digitize Hourglass Cruise specimens and the associated field data, fish data, and ships logs- creating a comprehensive marine biological resource of linked data for the online public domain. All digitized matter will be cataloged, uploaded to the FWC publicly accessible digital repository, and all digital materials will be offered to the State Library of Florida.

The Moravian Archives, Bethlehem (MAB) proposes a 24-month project to digitize approximately 13,248 pages of manuscript records of the Moravian Church in Antigua, 1760-1948. The membership catalogs, along with the “speaking” or “remark” books, that comprise this collection offer an extraordinary resource for the study of both the region, its pivotal role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and a detailed portrait of the struggles of a post-emancipation society. It provides a previously nearly-inaccessible record of the names and lives of thousands of African-Caribbean individuals, many with descendants living today in the Caribbean and mainland United States. Already sought in high demand by scholars and by Caribbean descendants, these invaluable materials will be digitized at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (CCAHA), with descriptive metadata added at the MAB, and then made freely accessible to researchers across the world via the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC).

In our two-year CLIR-funded effort “Book Traces @ UVA: Hidden in Plain Sight,” we successfully identified and catalogued thousands of unique reader interventions in pre-1923 books held in the University of Virginia Library circulating collections. In this one-year follow-up project, we propose to digitize all of the Library’s uniquely modified monographs in the field of American literature dated 1800-1922, and to explore crowdsourced transcription of marginalia, making the books more discoverable and accessible through the Library’s online catalog. This collection has potential to facilitate research on book history, reader reception, and—because many of the books and their readers have ties to Virginia and the University of Virginia—local history. We also want to demonstrate the value of retaining unique local copies of non-rare nineteenth century books as university libraries around the country move towards shared print repositories and face pressures to de-duplicate the lower-circulation items in their collections.

This three-year project will provide digital access to 576 Islamic manuscripts and 827 paintings heretofore largely invisible to scholars. Together these holdings represent in great breadth the Middle East’s flourishing intellectual and cultural heritage from 1000 to 1900, covering mathematics, astrology, history, law, literature, and the Qur’an and Hadith. The bulk are Arabic and Persian illuminated manuscripts, along with examples of Coptic, Indo-Persian, Samaritan, Syriac, and Turkish calligraphy, and paintings on disbound leaves and cuttings. Columbia University will digitize 345 manuscripts. University of Pennsylvania will digitize 84 of its codices, along with 94 manuscripts from the Free Library and smaller collections from Bryn Mawr and Haverford colleges. The Free Library will digitize 827 paintings. A cataloger will be hired by the University of Pennsylvania to enhance metadata for all partners. All digital images and records will be available as a unified collection at OPenn and added to other online repositories.

The NCSU Libraries and the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) as its collaborating institution, propose a three-year project to digitize an estimated 239,000 pages of mixed archival materials from the Libraries’ nationally significant animal rights and animal welfare collections, and an estimated 150,000 pages from the ASPCA’s records documenting its history as a leader in national animal protection since its founding in 1866. These materials document diverse and multi-disciplinary components of animal advocacy discourse in the growing field of human-animal studies. This enormous shift in scholarly interest is widely referred to as the “animal turn.” Major activities to be carried out include the digitization and description of an estimated 389,000 archival pages for online access and discoverability; outreach and promotion; the development of a digitization workflow plugin for ArchivesSpace; and contributions to the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) support of scholarly annotations.

The Kentucky State Archives proposes to digitize records from the Office of the Auditor of Public Accounts, also known as the Auditor’s Office. Over the course of 24 months, we will digitize 63 sets of bound volumes and loose documents, create appropriate metadata, and preserve and provide online public access to the digital surrogates using our digital preservation system Preservica. This collection documents the development of Kentucky government, infrastructure, and industry from 1792-1935, and will provide scholars and researchers with the opportunity to research topics such as river navigation, railroads, turnpikes, banks, corporations, distilled spirits, military papers, taxation, and land records. These records tell a comprehensive story of Kentucky’s history through reports made to the Auditor’s Office by state and local government agencies, institutions, and corporations.

The National Civil Rights Museum (“NCRM”) will partner with Rhodes College to plan and implement the digitization and creation of a digital collections management system of its Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Assassination Evidence Collection (“Evidence Collection”). From June 1, 2018-December 31, 2019, approximately 4,000 items, including documents, photographs and three dimensional artifacts will be digitized. The collection will be ingested into Rhodes College’s Crossroads to Freedom Digital Archive and made discoverable through Digital Library of Tennessee, Digital Public Library of America and Civil Rights Digital Library. Though some of this collection has been put online by the Shelby County Register of Deeds, it is not accordance with archival standards, without associated metadata or in a repository system. This project will result in true digital access to the Collection by the public and by scholars, allowing for greater understanding of one of the most historically significant events in American history.

Settled by William Penn in 1681 as a center for religious freedom, Philadelphia provided refuge for newcomers of many faiths. In the 18th century, Philadelphia served as the epicenter for political thought and action, as delegates to the Continental Congress and Constitutional Conventions met, debated, and worshiped together here. The religious organizations built by early Americans offer windows into colonial life through baptismal, circumcision, marriage, burial, and pew rental records: along with meeting minutes and correspondence, these documents act as transcripts of a time before census records and city directories existed. Unfortunately, as few congregations have active archival programs, access to these documents is limited. A CLIR grant would enable us -- Philadelphia’s historic congregations -- to create a digital database of shared records for a worldwide audience.

This project will provide enhanced access to 83 large-scale urban atlases of Boston and its metropolitan area from 1861-1938, through digitizing, georeferencing, and publishing on the web. Prepared primarily for the real estate industry, they are a critical resource for studying national patterns in urban change and immigration, because this urban area was the initial home for many immigrants, and a launchpad for further migration across the country. The Leventhal Map Center has the most comprehensive collection of these highly detailed and accurate atlases, which depict features such as building footprints and property owner names. They are a valued resource for researching urban growth and change, U.S. industrialization, transportation development, immigrant neighborhoods, architectural and urban planning, environmental hazards, genealogy, and urban ethnic history. The project will make the invaluable information hidden in these atlases freely accessible to all.

Digitizing Antioch will complete digitization and begin integration of a rich set of materials collected during important archeological excavations of the city of Antioch carried out by Princeton University and the French Archaeological Service during the 1930s in the French Mandate of Syria. The next step in an ongoing effort to create a scalable, interactive platform for scholars and students, the project will concentrate on the digitization of 19,400 coins and coin envelopes, and approximately 45,000 images and source documents in the University’s library and visual resources center. A project coordinator will implement a schema for integration with over 11,000 artifacts held by the University Art Museum. The effort will result in published Linked Open Data and images, provide a foundational discovery tool, and lay the foundation for a Digital Antioch Research Center, to be funded through other sources, making this important material widely available for the first time.