“Through the Golden Door” will digitize at-risk collections that illuminate formerly understudied aspects of immigrant and refugee experience. The Center for Jewish History will digitize materials from its in-house partner American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) and project partner the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA). The AJHS selections are from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) Records, Cecilia Razovsky Papers, and United Service for New Americans Records. From MOCA the Center will digitize the Fly to Freedom Collection of paper sculptures and two Chinese-American newspapers that demonstrate a shifting cultural landscape against the backdrop of the Cold War. The collections are significant to studies of the impact of US legislation on individuals and communities here and abroad; American responses to the persecution of European Jews; artistic expressions of conflicting identities; and print culture and community formation. They will provide a historical dimension to fierce debates on US policies of exclusion.

This three year project, initiated with IMLS seed funding, will provide online access to 30,000+ digital surrogates and detailed metadata from The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive’s Student Work Collection. This Collection represents over eight decades of The Cooper Union’s influential approach to architectural education. The Collection provides rich opportunities for intellectual and historical inquiry across photographs, text and audio recordings documenting over 2,500 student projects from the 1930’s–2006. The detailed, comprehensive nature of the collection’s material is unique among architecture/design schools and archives. As one of the first collections of its kind to be fully digitized at the item-level for public access, it will become an unprecedented research asset for design communities worldwide, including over 30,000 architecture students and faculty in the U.S. alone. This project will also enhance the Collection’s value as an educational resource for Cooper Union’s students, faculty, public programs and architecture pedagogy.

Bronx Community College (BCC) Archives seek funding for an arrangement and description project that will document the visual history of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans for BCC and for the wider New York City metropolitan area. The project will include identifying textual and visual materials for inclusion in a collection documenting the Hall of Fame; processing these materials; creating a collection-level record; and publishing a finding aid for the collection. The goal of this project is to document the Hall’s history and illustrate the decisive battles it survived—including funding struggles and ethnic conflicts—to remain a vital part of the Bronx and New York City.

Thomas Carlyle In America (TCIA) would digitize 92,621 pages of materials related to the controversial Victorian prophet, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), held at libraries across the United States. TCIA will be the next and largest venture of the Victorian Lives and Letters Consortium, an international scholarly network dedicated to creating digital archives of important but difficult to access Victorian sources. Scattered for over a century, the letters, artwork, research notes, annotated books, etc. represented in TCIA form a huge, lost or invisible archive of Carlyle and particularly his extensive American circle. Indeed, Carlyle’s reputation as “the Sage of Chelsea” depended heavily upon his “New England” audience. He strongly influenced Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Henry James Sr., and many others. According to Walt Whitman, Carlyle’s “final value” in this country was in “launching into the self-complacent atmosphere of our days a rasping, questioning, dislocating agitation and shock.”

This project will digitize a legacy collection of approximately 70,000 lantern slides in the collection of the Media Center for Art History (MCAH) at Columbia University, and create an online database to provide free access to the newly created metadata and high-resolution images. The images in the lantern slide collection cover a vast geographic and temporal scope, and will provide historically significant images and data about works of art and architecture, as well as provide a comprehensive archive of the historiography of art history at a time when the field was being created and shaped by some of the university’s most prominent faculty. Through integration with MCAH’s existing resources, including geolocation, virtual reality tours, and dynamic end-user collection building, and collaboration with other open access and linked data cultural heritage projects, the collection will be a synergistic resource for scholars, institutions, and the general public.

This project will create high-quality digital surrogates, transcriptions, translations, and a finding aid for 398 episodes of Bonjour!, a French language public access television program created by the Association Canado-Américaine (ACA) and the United Cable Company of Manchester, NH, and broadcast across parts of the US and Canada in the late 1980s-1990s. Each 30-minute magazine format episode includes studio interviews, segments recorded on location, and musical numbers. Interviews include a variety of Franco-American (Americans with French-Canadian heritage) immigrants and their descendants and prominent Franco-Americans in government, arts, education, and religious sectors from NH, ME, VT, MA, CT, RI, NY, TX, LA, and the Canadian provinces of Québec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. The collection of episodes is distributed among three institutions with Franco-American collections: Saint Anselm College, Assumption College, and the University of Maine (hereafter “Umaine”).

The one-year project will catalog and digitize the rare late 18th- to early 20th- century broadsides of the J. León Helguera Collection of Colombiana at Vanderbilt University. These primary sources trace Latin America’s independence from Spain and northern South America’s development into the nation of Gran Colombia (contemporary Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Panama). The rarest and largest portion of this private collection became part of Vanderbilt’s existing Helguera collection in November, 2016. Scholars from Europe, Colombia, and the US have visited and used the collection while in private hands and have urged that it be openly accessible. Malcolm Deas of Oxford writes “it is the leading collection, with no close rival anywhere.” Professor Frank Safford of Northwestern University states “it makes sense for the materials to be digitized, so Colombians can use it, as well as the rest of us.”

The year 2020 marks the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival in Plymouth, Massachusetts aboard Mayflower. This nationally significant anniversary commemorates the establishment of the first successful European colony in America, and highlights the significance of the Mayflower Compact- a governing covenant that was a precursor to the Constitution of the United States. Digitizing Plymouth County Archaeology is a three-year collaboration between Plimoth Plantation, Inc. and the University of Massachusetts, Boston (UMass), which will result in the digitization of three nationally significant archaeological collections from 17th-century Plymouth Colony and pre-contact Native homelands. Once digitized, these collections will be searchable online and will include printable, 3D renderings of significant artifacts from each collection, allowing them to be studied and printed in 3D by schools, scholars, museums and libraries to glean further insight as to how Native people and the colonists co-existed in early America.

The Maine State Archives and Old Fort Western propose to digitize and provide pertinent metadata for more than 28,000 pages of documents from 1705-1830. The records capture the social, commercial, inter-racial, military, governmental, and maritime activity on America’s eastern frontier, the Kennebec River in Maine. Using account ledgers, letterbooks, muster rolls, municipal records, property histories, and correspondence, the digitization will enable researchers and the public to have access to hitherto hidden collections that chronicle the progress of life here from early colonization, through the American Revolution, to Maine’s admission as a state in 1820. The project will assemble material from four contributing institutions for digitization in-house, and will provide free, online public access to primary documents. The digitized full-color documents with metadata will be discoverable through the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), and be open for crowd-sourced transcription through Digital Maine Transcription Project.

The Research Foundation of the City University of New York (RFCUNY), on behalf of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Archives at The City College of New York requests funding, in the amount of $164,049 from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) for one year project to digitize and make available for research the Hope R. Stevens Hidden Archives Collection (1926-2004) of one of New York’s most prominent Harlem attorneys, civil rights activist and renowned international leader. The collection was created by Hope R. Stevens during the course of his life and donated to the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Archives by his son Anthony Stevens-Acevedo. The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Archives will digitize, create a corresponding metadata, and make available for research approximately 25,000 images of historic documents, photographs, artifacts, certificates, correspondences, awards and other items related to Mr. Stevens’ community, national and international activities.

This project will digitize the only known original copy of the Philadelphia Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide, a trade journal (1886-1940) that provided detailed reporting of building activity in Philadelphia and other east-coast cities from Washington to Boston. The Athenaeum has a complete run of the journal: 50,000 pages and 55 volumes. The Builders' Guide has references to hundreds of thousands of buildings but has no index. The proposed project will make this remarkable resource easily available to scholars and lay researchers by developing a free Builders' Guide website, providing access to the images of all of the issues; full-text of the pages; full-text search; and a direct interface with the Athenaeum's Philadelphia Architects and Buildings website. In addition all Builders' Guide scanned images and metadata describing the issues will be made publicly available on the Internet Archive website.

Since 1971, Earthwatch has supported over 1,400 field-research projects that involve citizen science. Many projects have been led by eminent scientists, with positive conservation impacts worldwide. We have meticulously documented projects, but much is in non-electronic media. We propose to digitize two archival collections dating from 1971 to 2010, given their high relevance to science and environmental history, creating the Earthwatch Digital Commons. The largest existing archive of contributory citizen science, it includes reports, correspondence, photographs, and project data. It would provide an important open-access resource for multi-disciplinary scholars and the public, as it contains information essential to understanding the benefits of contributory science. Digitizing key materials from our archives will also preserve this information for future generations. In a rapidly changing world in which extinction threatens many species, our collections are invaluable resources for anyone seeking to understand the value of citizen science and scientific strategies to advance conservation.

This project aims to digitize and digitally catalog the archives of the Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory (VPL) of The University of Texas at Austin over two years. The archival materials consist of 554 cubic feet (cf) of uncatalogued and undescribed maps, field notes, research permits, correspondence, images, artwork, and other documents relating to the history of paleontology in Texas and North America. The fossil holdings at VPL house approximately 250,000 cataloged specimens, the seventh largest vertebrate collection in the US. The archival materials represent the scientific and historic context for specimens collected from the late 19th century to the present day, and held in trust as a State, Federal, and Navajo Nation repository.

Hennepin County Library, in collaboration with the City of Minneapolis, proposes to digitize and describe 15,000 photographs, and describe 20,000 previously digitized photographs recording the city’s houses, buildings, streets, bridges, schools, hospitals, libraries, construction and redevelopment projects, and various infrastructure elements. The Library also proposes to digitize and transcribe a WPA survey of Minneapolis housing from 1934, consisting of over 140,000 pages of handwritten data.

Digitizing the Yale Babylonian Collection is a two-year project to digitize c. 34,000 cuneiform artefacts housed in the Yale Babylonian Collection (YBC). The Collection represents one of the most substantial cuneiform collections in the world and holds documents of unparalleled historical significance, shedding light on the earliest phases of human history. The aim of the project is to create and disseminate comprehensive documentation for research communities focused on deciphering and producing scholarship on the ancient Near East. The project will use two different imaging techniques, flatbed scanning and RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imagery), to digitize the artefacts and disseminate them through Yale’s Discovery portal, the YBC website and the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, hosted at UCLA which functions as the digital portal for cuneiform inscriptions. The project will make the cuneiform texts held at YBC globally accessible to scholars as well as to the public.

Between February 1971 and July 1973, President Richard Nixon recorded 3,432 hours of phone calls and meetings. These tapes remain the greatest treasure of information left by a president and the most complex, controversial set of presidential records in U.S. history. However, 57% of the 2,658 hours of publicly released Nixon White House tapes remain hidden and relatively unexplored in analog formats at the National Archives in Maryland and Nixon Library in California. This three-year collaborative project between the Richard Nixon Foundation and Texas A&M University – Central Texas will digitize 1,513 hours of tape and ensure these files are widely accessible online to researchers and the public at-large. This project is part of a larger commitment to digitize, catalog and transcribe the tapes. The project facilitates creation and dissemination of new knowledge via a widely accessible, comprehensive collection of free digital files chronicling this important period in U.S. history.

The two year project will digitize and make publically available records of the nearly 20,000 historic and designer garments and dress-related objects held by the Texas Fashion Collection at the University of North Texas. The TFC’s holdings include important examples of American ready-to-wear and high fashion, many of which are by designers not represented in other archives and museum collections. This project will encompass transferring data from an outdated proprietary database to a new web-based program, editing existing metadata to make it more robust, photographing undocumented objects, and making records publicly available through a free web-based platform.

A two-year project to process and digitize two important music collections from the pre-World War II archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. RG 7 Music (Vilna Archives) consists of over 35 linear feet of manuscripts of musical works for the Yiddish theater, including music for about 450 operas and operettas, from the 1890s to the 1930s. RG 37 Jewish Music Societies is a smaller collection containing records of Jewish music societies in Eastern Europe from 1908-1931. Both collections contain unique primary sources for the study of Jewish music by musicologists, theater historians, and musicians, and are now largely inaccessible. The digitized images will be made available, via EAD finding aids, on the free-access website of the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Collections project, a 7-year international initiative, begun in 2015, to reunite collections that were looted by the Nazis and dispersed among four repositories in Lithuania and New York.

The George Washington University Libraries proposes an 18-month project to digitize high-priority series from the National Education Association Archives, a 2,200 linear foot collection dating from 1857 to present. As the largest labor union in the country and a major advocacy organization, the NEA has been involved in virtually every social and political issue influencing American education policy. The collection includes materials on desegregation, school choice, funding of public education, rural and urban schools, and teaching as a gendered profession. We propose a tiered digitization project that invites an Advisory Group of scholars in diverse subject areas to help prioritize a critical mass for digitization that has high research potential in areas of study that remain “hidden” in the collection. We will actively promote broad, inclusive access to digitized content by bringing material to the people across multiple access platforms and supporting new modes of computational access and re-use.

Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) proposes a project to digitize and make accessible online the records of Everett and Evelyn Ortner as leaders in NYC’s historic preservation and urban revival movements across the country. The collection’s extensive evidence of the Ortner’s successful grassroots activism and influence on urban revival movements nationwide make it an essential source for scholars studying cultural movements, the transformation of post-industrial cities, gentrification, activism, architecture, and more. The collection reveals motivations and processes of work that were foundational to the current renewed interest in urban living and the explosive popularity of Brooklyn as a brand, adding an important source to look to in the evolving conversation on these topics. Digitization will provide exponentially increased access, particularly to remote and digital researchers, making possible new kinds of scholarship, both local and national in scope.

miSci requests $121,500 to digitize and make accessible 36,000 images in the General Electric (GE) Photograph Collection focused on the urban landscape, including the street lighting, street railway, and expositions sections of the collection. The project will focus on images from 1880-1970, which document downtown public spaces and major public events. Free online access will leverage existing relationships and utilize the New York Heritage online database and Digital Public Library of America. miSci will hire two digitization technicians and three catalogers for the two years of the project. The project will take advantage of efficiencies in the both the scanning and metadata creation process. Scanning will be made efficient due to consistent image sizes and types. Project catalogers will also take advantage of pre-existing guides and templates, as well as the caption, date, and subject information included on each GE photograph to increase cataloging efficiency.

This two-year project will provide digital access to the Baltimore Gas & Electric Company Image Collection, a major research collection that chronicles the development of Baltimore between 1920 and 1975 through approximately 180,000 photographic prints, negatives, and movies. Working together with the BMI’s director of collections and archivist, a dedicated project team will selectively scan thousands of historically significant still and moving images from the BGE Collection and create a consolidated cataloging system for accessing them online. Made freely available on the museum’s website, these digitized photographs and improved metadata will offer researchers an indispensable resource for studying the local and regional history of Baltimore.

This project proposes the digitization of a corpus of rare nineteenth-century Peruvian serials, ephemeral circulars, and popular song and verse imprints held in the José E. Durand Collection at the University of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Libraries. These unique materials support new scholarship on diverse political, religious, and cultural topics in Peruvian history. They also offer new insights on the worldwide nineteenth-century revolution in print culture, providing fodder for comparative work by scholars in and across many disciplines. The materials will be re-catalogued or described for the first time, enhanced with OCR, and incorporated into a digital collection (approximately 21,000 images) within the Libraries’ repository that allows users to browse and to search and sort according to research interests. Along with uniting a wide variety of valuable, difficult-to-access sources together in one location, this project effectively returns these materials to Peruvians through its commitment to open access.

Chinese Historical Museum of America (CHSA) in San Francisco and the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum (SDCHM) will conduct a 36-month project to create an online repository of digitized text-based materials, objects, and photographs from the museums’ holdings related to the history of Chinese immigrants in California. Together, the collections include approximately 30,000 ethnographic artifacts and archival materials spanning the last century and a half of Chinese in America. As the two museums are located in Northern and Southern California respectively, this project will make significant scholarly resources on the history of early Chinese immigration, Chinatowns, and ethnic revival in early Chinese American populations across the State widely available. Today, as the number of Chinese descendants in the US has risen to nearly 4 million, with the greatest concentration in California, this joint collaboration will provide a public narrative of the journey of this rapidly growing and increasingly visible community.

This 18-month project conducted by the Filson Historical Society will digitize materials from 18th and 19th century manuscript collections relating to enslaved African Americans in the southeastern United States, and a small number of items related to freedmen and women. Record types include, among others, correspondence, journals, bills of sale, ledgers, and estate documents. The project will consist of the in-house digitization of materials; item-level cataloging building on pre-existing collection-level cataloging; entering digital materials into an online content management system and digital access tools. Access to the digitized materials by researchers in the region and across the globe will allow for new scholarship on both the broader institution of slavery and on the histories of individual slaves and families. This project will be the Filson’s initial major digitization effort following the recent addition of a grant-funded digitization lab and content management system for cataloging and online access.