Our Story: Digitizing Publications and Photographs of the Historically Black Atlanta University Center Institutions is a thirty month collaborative project between the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, Spelman College Archives, Morehouse College, and the Digital Library of Georgia. Through digital reformatting, creation of metadata and a portal of publicly accessible collections on the AUC Woodruff Library's Digital Commons and the DLG, this project will broaden access to unique publications, periodicals, theses, dissertations and photographs documenting the history of the AUC - the largest consortium of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Once completed, archives related to the following schools will be more easily discoverable throughout the world for scholarship about various aspects of African American higher education directly after emancipation of slavery through to the 21st Century: Atlanta University, Clark College, Clark Atlanta University, Gammon Theological Seminary, Interdenominational Theological Center, Morehouse College, Morris Brown College, and Spelman College.

Over a 3-year period, the Claremont Colleges Library, A.K. Smiley Public Library, California State University Northridge Oviatt Library, California State University San Bernardino Water Resources Institute, National Archives and Records Administration at Riverside, Ontario City Library, and Upland Public Library will collaborate on digitizing materials that originated from a variety of sources such as federal, state, and local governments, water companies, local agencies, engineers, and other individuals involved in water development in the region from the 19th through the 20th centuries. This project targets more than 30 archival collections to be digitized, uploaded to an online digital asset management system, cataloged with descriptive metadata, and placed under a curation plan. The digitized collections will be accessible to all with internet access, provide a foundation for a "distributed" digital water resource archive, and facilitate and support digital scholarship for regional, national, and international researchers.

Out Front: 60 Years of LGBTQ Political Graphics at ONE Archives will expose a wealth of visual materials documenting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) viewpoints since the 1950s. To advance the cultural understanding of queer politics and visual culture, our project will digitize 4,200 political posters and protest signs from ONE's collections for free online public access via the USC Digital Library and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). These artifacts include thousands of posters and handmade signs from the earliest protests and pride celebrations. Some highlights are iconic posters created by ACT UP, the Gay Liberation Front, and 1950s-era homophile organizations like the Mattachine Society. These posters, stored in flat files at the ONE Archives' facility, are exceedingly difficult to access. They comprise some of the few remaining visual traces of pioneering activists and organizations that advanced the struggle for LGBTQ equality.

Estela Bravo is a U.S. citizen who has lived in Cuba for more than fifty years and has been a filmmaker for nearly forty years. Ernesto Bravo is an Argentinian-born physician. Many of their works focus on the relationship between the U.S. and Cuba, tackling such topics as U.S. visitors and residents in Cuba to Cuban immigrants in the U.S. Their lens encompasses the views and experiences of politicians, activists, cultural figures, and everyday people. NYU's Tamiment Library has acquired the film and video archive of the Bravo's and proposes a two-year project to digitize several complete works, and dozens of unedited interviews that were conducted in the process of making those films. The existing formats of the media collection include U-matic and Betacam videotapes and 16mm and 35mm reels. The project intends to make these materials available on the Internet, where they will provide a previously unavailable source.

Virginia Tech maintains the world's largest and longest continually operating collection of archival materials documenting women's contributions to architecture and design. This two-year project will digitize, describe, and provide virtual access to approximately 800 cubic feet of materials that illuminate the contributions of women to architecture and design in the United States and across the world from 1929-2010. Digitization will facilitate meaningful scholarly explorations into the historic contributions of women to the built environment, 20th century gender and labor issues, women's experiences in higher education, and international migration studies. Representing the legacies of thirty women from ten countries who practiced architecture and design in the United States, these collections comprise architectural drawings and design sketches, personal and professional correspondence, project files, business records, and photographs. Digitization of these underutilized collections will make the legacies of this traditionally marginalized community discoverable, accessible, and usable to a new generation of multidisciplinary scholars.

Pennsylvania State University is the sole participating institution for the proposed two year project (June 2017 - May 2019). The materials represent selected union records and personal papers of labor leaders, and include a wide variety of material formats that document the historical nexus of three important American labor organizations - the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), and Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers (AAISTW) in forging the CIO industrial union movement in the 1930s. The proposed project would greatly increase the discoverability and accessibility of these rich historical materials to national and international scholars and inform future collaborative efforts to further document this important intersection of labor and social history. The specific activities undertaken as a part of this project will include in-house digitization, vendor digitization, and the hosting of digitized surrogates and associated metadata via the identified repositories.

The New York Public Library seeks $84,640 to digitize 176 bound, oversized volumes (approximately 150,000 pages) from the archives of the New York-based Brown Brothers & Co. and Liverpool- based Brown, Shipley & Co., two companies run by brothers from one of the nineteenth century's most powerful Anglo-American merchant families. These volumes, primarily handwritten accounting ledgers and journals (1825-1889), document the inner workings of a major merchant firm during the formative period of American history and global capitalism. This record of accounting work provides aggregate detail to broader narratives of the histories of merchant capitalism, cotton and textiles manufacturing, slavery, economic colonialism, transportation and communication technological advances, the Civil War, gold trade, and monetary exchange. This project will bring this mass of detail, as images, into the digital age, and provide the foundational raw materials for a deeper, more thorough computational and scholarly examination of these important histories.

The project will digitize a portion of the M. Watt Espy Papers consisting of approximately 44 cubic feet of primary and secondary source material, and approximately 28,800 index cards. The Digital Archive of Executions will be a freely accessible online database of documents and Espy's analysis of government sanctioned executions in the United States from 1608-2002. Appealing to a broad range of potential researchers, students, and scholars, the project will increase access for those interested in history, political science, criminal justice, sociology or law. Future researchers might utilize specific records related to individual criminal cases, while others might review broader material to analyze umbrella issues, like innocents executed, or collect data to mount a legal defense. The Espy Papers, previously processed and rehoused, will be digitized and made full text searchable, with metadata available on individuals executed, their race, gender, crime, method of execution, and Espy's written analysis.

The Vietnam Center and Archive (VNCA) will digitize 55 linear feet of manuscript material from our holdings. The collections selected cover many aspects of the Vietnam War, from the clandestine operations of the MACV-SOG teams, to the nuts and bolts operations of Psychological Operations (PSYOPs) teams and the Phoenix Program. They also give a more in-depth view of key aspects of the war, like daily operations of major units, firsthand accounts of the Tet Offensive, and the aftermath of the Operation Babylift crash. With the commemoration of the Vietnam War's 50th Anniversary going on through 2025, it is important to make these materials widely available to help scholars answer questions about a war that is still controversial to this day. The VNCA will add the files to our Virtual Vietnam Archive, a keyword-searchable database and one of the world's largest online archives of freely available materials about the Vietnam War.

This project will create high-quality digital surrogates of analog collections of home movies and amateur film and video made by women between 1925 and 1997. The collections are held by Northeast Historic Film, the Lesbian Home Movie Project, and Chicago Film Archives. The project will result in item level catalog records, finding aids, and newly digitized surrogates from film and video made by women filmmakers that will be shared online via a project website that links users back to the holding institutions' websites. Most of these works are original camera reversal, meaning no other copies exist. Protecting original analog media with excellent digital surrogates advances research and preservation. The project holds great significance for scholarship by providing online access to films currently unavailable for off-site viewing and by challenging the notion that women were simply the subjects of home movies and amateur film, rather than filmmakers themselves.

As part of the Inland Empire Memories initiative, the University of California, Riverside (UCR) Library and the Sherman Indian Museum propose a project to digitize the Museum's extensive collection that documents the history of the Sherman Institute and Sherman Indian High School (1892-present) located in Riverside, California as well as the Native American experience in the US and within government-run American Indian boarding schools. The school has served over 500 tribal nations and is still operational today as one of only two such remaining institutions in California. The Museum, including their archive, opened in 1972 and houses material that includes administrative ledgers, student rosters and yearbooks, historical photographs, and school bulletins. Using a combination of on-site and vendor-based digitization we will digitize approximately 14,320 items containing an estimated 55,000 pages, making this collection widely accessible to tribal communities and a worldwide audience through the California Digital Library's Calisphere platform.

The American Folk Art Museum seeks to digitize the New York Quilt Project, making the documentation for 6,333 quilts made in New York before 1940 accessible and searchable in the Quilt Index (QI), an international quilt digital repository developed and led by Michigan State University Museum (MSUM) and MSU's MATRIX: Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences. Quilt documentation has high research value--quilts reflect the political, social, and religious views of (mostly) women and their communities in early America that transcend state lines. Once digitized, this information will be uploaded to the Quilt Index (www.quiltindex.org) where it can searched and compared with data on more than 80,000 other records already in the QI. The addition of the New York Quilt Project to the Quilt Index will increase MSU's total holdings by nearly 10%, making a significant contribution of quilt research and scholarship widely available.

Iowa State University Library proposes a 24 month project to establish the Avian Archives of Iowa Online (avIAn), a portal for digital Iowa ornithological primary sources. The eight collections we have selected for this project provide robust documentation of over one hundred years of bird study in Iowa and encompass some of the Midwest's most influential conservationists. The project will present approximately 13,600 documents, 2,124 images, 14 field journals, and 7 audiovisual recordings freely accessible online and available for education and personal reuse. avIAn will become a space for future collaboration with other archives holding materials pertaining to ornithological collections from Iowa and the Mississippi Flyway. A special feature of this project is our presentation of the items as both archival materials and as scientific data. We have designed the project to enable use as formal scientific data as well as more traditional humanities and educational uses.

Step right up and enter the astounding world of circus! For centuries, circuses brought the wonders of the world to cities and towns along the shows' routes. Similar to yearbooks, route books contain information about people, positions, events, and the show's season. Currently, these volumes are difficult to access for researchers, yet no other publication covers as much unique information. Our goal is to provide online access for researchers who are currently limited to physical access to these primary sources. Circus World, Illinois State University, and The Ringling will accomplish this goal in three years by digitizing 315 route books (out of 400 known in existence). This project will facilitate discovery by applying a controlled vocabulary to metadata and aggregating images into a single digital collection. Illinois State University and The Ringling will digitize their respective collections on-site, whereas Illinois State University will also digitize Circus World's collection.

Northern Illinois University (NIU) and Villanova University (VU) propose to digitize the dime novels of Beadle & Adams, the first and most important publisher of the format. The project will involve digitizing Albert Johannsen's personal collection, acquired by NIU in 1967, and will include related publications from VU's special collections. A total of 5,400 dime novels will be digitized and made freely available to read and download via the website Nickels and Dimes. In addition, the project will incorporate metadata from Johannsen's The House of Beadle and Adams and their Nickel and Dime Novels (1950), one of the most significant works of dime novel scholarship and bibliography of the 20th century, including relationships between stories, editions, and authors. This will be published as open linked data on dimenovels.org and include digital holdings information, which will be used to coordinate dime novel digitization across multiple institutions.

Unprecedented in its scope and comprehensiveness, the Four Valleys collection consists of all paper, photographic, and digital records resulting from archaeological investigations conducted in four northwest Honduran basins. Housed at Kenyon College, Ohio, its digitization promotes information equality by enabling diverse constituencies to address questions of political, economic, and cultural change from 1200BC through the 17th century. The archive contains data on the configurations, sizes, and locations of 941 significant sites, along with excavation results at 180 settlements, and the analysis of over one million artifacts. Spanning 1983-2013, the research has generated 47 publications, 128 papers, and 68 PhDs, MAs, and undergraduate honors theses. Over a two-year period we propose to: complete digitizing these records; upload them to a sustainable, accessible platform; advertise their presence; and assess the digital archive as a research and teaching tool in archaeology, colonial history, art history, information science, and training in the field sciences.

The project proposes to digitize approximately 1,500 woodblock, copperplate, and manuscript maps produced in Japan between the 1600s and 1923 and now held by the East Asian Library, and to add them to a website already developed by David Rumsey and Cartography Associates. The website, http://www.davidrumsey.com/japan/, which currently provides access to images of just over 800 maps from the same collection, allows researchers to access the maps without stressing the materials. It also allows researchers to enlarge details, save images to a file, add notes, and juxtapose or superimpose maps and satellite images for comparison. These functions, coupled with the size and variety of the entire map collection, will allow researchers to use the maps to trace political, cultural, administrative, and topographical change, as well as the development of Japanese cartography, from premodern times into the twentieth century.

The 12-month project encompasses the digitization of 340 Big Blue Books produced by Socialist Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius from 1925-1951, and held by Pittsburg State University's Special Collections department at Leonard H. Axe Library. The collection enriches the digital resources available to scholars of socialism, free-thought, women's rights, atheism, and agnosticism at a time when such thoughts were considered radical. It is part of the richest and most complete archival collection of early 20th century socialist and freethought materials produced in southeastern Kansas, which was once called the "cradle of American social reform." The digital files will be stored by Axe Library and made available through PSU's Digital Commons repository; metadata will be harvested by the library catalog and made available globally through Digital Commons.

Binghamton University is one of the few institutions in the world possessing an extensive collection of materials related to the history and culture of the Kurdish people -- the Vera Saeedpour Kurdish Library & Museum Collection. This collection includes manuscripts, literature, private papers, artwork, newspapers, journals, maps, and material artifacts. Binghamton University is requesting funds for a two-year project which will allow for the digitization of this collection to make its contents available through open online access. Bound journals and newspapers will be outsourced for digitization and unbound journals, newspapers, correspondence, and photographs will be digitized in-house. Material artifacts will be photographed professionally. Funding is requested for employees to digitize and document the collection, translate key documents to English, and assist with the creation of metadata. Making these materials readily accessible online will help scholars and researchers globally in different academic disciplines such as Kurdish, Turkish, Ottoman, and Middle Eastern Studies.

With an eye toward revealing undiscovered cartographic treasures for new scholarly audiences, this 2-year project undertaken by the John Carter Brown Library will digitize all maps within cataloged books from the Library's peerless collection of materials related to the history of the Americas from the time of European discovery (1492) through the end of the colonial period (circa 1825). Averaging six per title in approximately 2,500 titles (4,000 volumes), these maps will be scanned, described, and then uploaded into the Library's digitized image management system (Luna). Scholars from around the world use the Library's holdings to support and inform their scholarship, including the roughly 1,500 loose maps already digitized and freely available. This project will enable high-resolution access to an untapped cartographic resource that spans the globe and will provide an innovative entry point for researchers seeking out new historical worlds to analyze and explore.

Philadelphia is the iconic city of the American Revolution, home to the Continental Congress, Independence Hall, and the Liberty Bell. Most Americans associate it with the Declaration of Independence, the founding of a new nation, and the story of how a united citizenry declared themselves free, overthrowing a monarchy to create a democracy. The project will tell this story through collections housed in four of Philadelphia's great repositories: the American Philosophical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania. These institutions hold the papers of some of the best-known Philadelphia revolutionaries, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. However, the project will do more than tell their story. Its primary goal is to comprehensively digitize the vast array of small, often-overlooked collections in these institutions that tell the compelling personal story of how the Revolution affected the city and its residents.

This project will digitize materials relating to the history of Schoharie County and its residents, from its Native American settlements to the current rural and small town populations. Materials on Native American history in the area are held by the Iroquois Indian Museum; those relating to the European colonization and early to modern American residents are held by the Schoharie County Historical Society; and those relating to the history of local post-secondary education (primarily agricultural) are held by SUNY Cobleskill. The materials will be digitally scanned, described, and uploaded into DSpace for wide access. Together the collections provide a broad history of human life and culture in the area for more than 800 years.

This one-year project will accomplish the digitization, long-term preservation and dissemination of the James W. Kimball Traditional Music Collection. The materials document traditional New York State musicians in field and commercial recordings of interviews and performances, as well as extensive supporting information in print, photographic, manuscript and published media. The collection provides a unique opportunity for scholars of American Traditional Music with an emphasis on rural New York State. We will target audio and audiovisual recordings with the greatest risk of data degradation or loss. We will proceed to digitize print and ephemera with direct relationships to the recordings. This project is part of a larger initiative by SUNY Geneseo, the Genesee Valley Council on the Arts (GVCA) and community stakeholders to preserve and manage the entire collection. Partnering entities will develop a comprehensive, systematic plan of use, access, and sustainability for academic, artistic, and community constituencies.

The Mount Saint Joseph Archives proposes a twenty-four-month project to digitize eleven collections of materials related to the Mount Saint Joseph Academy and Junior College, two Catholic institutions that provided education to underserved women and girls in rural western Kentucky during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Materials in these collections include the papers of Mount Saint Joseph Academy's founders, the student newspaper, records of two national Catholic student organizations, early student work, records of reading materials made available to students, information catalogs, and photographs of teachers, students, activities, events, and the schools. The Archives plans to digitize eleven collections and make them available to the public on the Internet Archive and the Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA) Catholic Portal. The project will allow scholars, educators, students, and the general public access to previously hidden collections that speak to both Catholic education and female education in rural America.

The Marian Anderson Papers rank among the top five most frequently consulted collections in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. Recognized as one of the 20th centuries' greatest singers, Anderson, an African American, was born in Philadelphia in 1897. Because of her race Anderson faced blind prejudice, but she persevered. From the age of twenty until her retirement in 1965, she was in constant demand as a performer. We propose to digitize five series within her fully processed archive: 200 hours of sound recordings, 33 interviews, including 31 hours of audio recordings and transcriptions, 1500 recital programs, 146 diaries, and 30 scrapbooks. The materials selected for digitization offer researchers the ability to examine Anderson's career through the dual purview of cultural geography and her extensive repertoire (programs); gain deeper understanding of her life (interviews and diaries); and marvel at her reception and fame (scrapbooks).