Hidden Collections Registry - Dev

Items

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  UMN Libraries/Umbra African American Digital Collection (UMN AADC): Digitizing African American Archival Materials Across University of Minnesota Collections (Social Welfare History, YMCA Archives, Children's Literature Research Collections, Performing Arts, Literary, Tretter GLBT, University Archives, James Ford Bell Library, and more).

  This two-year project amasses an African American digital collection from every collecting/research area at UMN Archives and Special Collections (ASC). In every collection included in this request, we have already identified materials at the folder/box/collection level that document African American history and culture. Once digitized, 500,000 objects from more than 70 collections across all 12 UMN collecting units will be accessible through local and national discovery platforms. Further, by working across collecting units, we will pilot a methodology for cross-institutional digitization efforts that surface African American materials. This work also supports Umbra: Search African American History (Umbrasearch.org), created by UMN Libraries' Givens Collection of African American Literature. Umbra is a freely available search tool that brings together digitized materials from US libraries and archives. Umbra recognizes that documentation of Black life is often found in the shadows"”or the umbra"”of many collections, not just those identified as "African American."
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  The Digital Archive of Native American Petitions in Massachusetts

  A project to digitize approximately 4,500 petitions from and about Native American peoples throughout the Northeast that are held at the Massachusetts Archives of the Commonwealth in Boston. At least one-third of these petitions are authored by Native people themselves and many more are co-authored. Others express the views of non-Native peoples about issues affecting American Indian life. Because Massachusetts was an important trading and diplomatic space, the petitions come from the Great Lakes, contemporary Canada, Maine, and the Connecticut and Hudson River Valleys. The petitions, already having been initially processed, will be thoroughly catalogued with metadata information, and will then be digitized and rehoused with conservation measures. The digital repository will be created at Harvard's Dataverse and replicated at Yale. This free, publicly accessible resource will enrich Native American studies, American history, anthropology and other humanistic pursuits.
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  The Road from Hell is Paved with Little Rocks: Digitizing the History of Segregation and Integration of Arkansas's Educational System

  This 18-month project brings together the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture, Central Arkansas Library System Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, and Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site to digitize a range of materials documenting African American education during segregation and the path to integration. Digitization of collections from the three institutions, which include manuscripts, oral histories, photographs, and audiovisual recordings, will be outsourced, while metadata adaptation and creation will be done in-house. In addition to a blog documenting the project, staff will create a virtual exhibit to provide an overview of and historical context for the digitized material. Digitizing this unique group of archival collections will provide scholars of civil rights, race, education, and the law the opportunity to study the evolution of education in Arkansas through the lens of religion, the judicial system, and contemporary students and educators.
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  "I thought there was nothing so glorious as war": Creating Online Access to the World War I Materials at The Museum of Flight

  The Museum of Flight will conduct an 18-month project to create an online repository of digitized photographs, manuscripts, and ephemera from our holdings related to World War I. The collections include approximately 2,500 photos, 25 aircraft and engine manuals, 23 pieces of sheet music, 53 stereo cards, and 6 cubic feet of manuscripts and ephemera. As the United States approaches the 100 year anniversary of our entry into World War I, this project will make significant scholarly resources on the history of aviation during the war widely available and will help deepen our understanding and appreciation of the people who built and flew aircraft during this time period. The project will also be a significant first step in developing a formal digitization program for The Museum of Flight.
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  Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis: Toward A Comprehensive Online Library of Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts in PACSCL Libraries in Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware

  This project, hosted at Lehigh University Library and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and involving fifteen members of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL), will provide online access to high-resolution images, with metadata, of 159,512 pages of medieval manuscripts from more than 400 codices plus leaves. These images will be released to the public domain for free use by scholars and the general public and, added to existing digitized resources, will make the overwhelming majority of the region's medieval manuscripts -- one of the largest concentrations in the United States -- available worldwide, in their entirety and easily downloadable. By providing unfettered, unmediated consolidated access to such a comprehensive corpus of images and metadata, the project will shape a new understanding of libraries' and archives' role in sharing our historical and cultural heritage. (Member libraries are also contributing previously-digitized manuscripts at no cost to the project.)
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  Sharing "Gabo" with the World: Building the Gabriel Garci­a Marquez Online Archive from His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center

  The Harry Ransom Center proposes an eighteen-month project to digitize major segments of the papers of Gabriel Garci­a Marquez (1927-2014), considered one of the most significant authors of the twentieth century and affectionately known as "Gabo" throughout Latin America. His family has given permission to share a huge trove of materials online, including manuscripts for novels, a memoir, screenplays, and non-fiction writings; notebooks; scrapbooks; photographs; and related ephemera. The Center plans to: digitize at least 24,000 pages and make them available as an online digital archive; enable FancyBox viewing of the images from within the finding aid; and implement Mirador Image Viewer to allow scholars to compare drafts of evolving literary works side-by-side. The project will allow unprecedented access to the creative mind of a major contemporary author--through papers never before made available to the public--to a worldwide audience for the benefit of scholars, educators, and students everywhere.
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  Revealing our melting past: Toward a digital library of historic glacier photography

  The climate is changing rapidly. The answer to the question of how rapidly, however, depends directly on how long relevant data can be analyzed. Archival data, then, which predates the satellite era, is essential to the study of climate change over time. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) is responsible for managing, archiving, and disseminating cryospheric and polar data. Today, these data are digital. However, hidden within the NSIDC is a collection of historical archival materials that record the earth's glaciated regions prior to modern data gathering methods, and this archive has no dedicated archivist. We seek to digitize the entirety of the archive's print glacier photograph collection in order to enable new scientific discoveries related to climate change, and to help tell the story of a warming planet to the public and policy makers. This project will be a rapid prototype for potential future collaborations.
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  Voices of the Revolution: Digitizing 30,000 French Pamphlets from the Newberry Library

  Through Voices of the Revolution, researchers will gain access to full-text searchable digital files (an estimated 510,000 pages of text) for 30,000 French Revolution pamphlets. These pamphlets represent an unparalleled corpus of material and support numerous fields of literary and historical study including legal, social, and cultural history, and the history of printing and publication. Voices of the Revolution is a model, cost-effective, rare materials digitization project that combines off-site digitization for a majority of pamphlets with in-house digitization for items too fragile to be removed from the Newberry. Metadata will be derived from existing MARC records for the pamphlets. In order to reach as many potential users as possible, digital files and associated metadata will be available through multiple portals: Internet Archive, WorldCat, local online catalogs, Digital Public Library of America, and HathiTrust. Downloadable data sets of all files and metadata will also be provided for digital humanities scholarship.
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  The Edison Collection of American Sheet Music, 1800-1870

  The University of Michigan Library will catalog and digitize nearly 36,000 pieces of music from the Edison Sheet Music Collection. At the end of this two-year project, catalog records and full-text scans will be discoverable through our local online catalog and through the HathiTrust Digital Library, Digital Public Library of America, and Sheet Music Consortium. This collection is one of the largest of its type, and, with approximately seventy-five percent of its editions not yet represented in the major repositories of sheet music, once made accessible will reveal a significant portion of the repertory that is not yet known. This material was published in the United States between 1800 and 1870 and reveals much about the development of popular music as both a business and an artistic genre; it also provides insight into music-making in nineteenth-century America and reflects the public tastes and social issues of the day.
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  PBS NewsHour Digitization Project.

  This 40-year collection of daily broadcast news programs includes The Robert MacNeil Report, The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. This project will digitize 32 years, from October 1975-December 2007, the complete collection of program materials currently on obsolete analog formats. This 30-month project is a collaboration between WGBH, Greater Washington Educational Telecommunications Association (WETA), WETA's wholly-owned subsidiary NewsHour Productions LLC, and the Library of Congress for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB). The project will digitize, preserve and allow public access via the AAPB website to PBS NewsHour's predecessor programs that are currently on obsolete video formats of 2", 1", ¾" and Beta. The project will digitize nightly programs from 1975 until December 2007 that chronicle American and world history, providing scholars access to original source material, including interviews with presidents and other world leaders and reports on major issues and events. More than 9,000 existing transcripts for the entire 40 years of programs (1975 - present) will be made available. As part of the AAPB, scholars will be able to compare and study the differences between national news and local news from public media stations across the country.
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  Digitizing British Manuscripts at UCLA's Clark Library, 1601-1800

  The 18-month project encompasses the digitization of 300 bound manuscripts produced in Great Britain between 1601 and 1800 and held by the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, administered by UCLA's Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies. The collection complements holdings of other research libraries and specifically enriches the digital resources available to scholars of British cultural, political, and social history. The manuscripts comprise commonplace books, sermons, inventories, poems, plays, recipe books, accounts, and music. The facsimiles will be stored and hosted by the UCLA Digital Library; metadata will be harvested by Calisphere and Digital Public Library of America for enhanced discovery. Existing cataloging records in UCLA's online catalog as well as WorldCat will be updated to provide direct access to individual facsimiles through electronic links. The Center/Clark will host a symposium with scholars and librarians to discuss enhancements such as searchable transcriptions and collaborations with existing projects such as EMMO.

• Celebrating a Century of Stewardship & Engagement: Digitizing the Collections of National Park Service Directors

  Clemson University seeks to digitize the full collected papers of 8 former National Park Service (NPS) Directors housed in its Special Collections Library to coincide with the centennial of the NPS in 2016. George B. Hartzog, the seventh Director of the National Park Service, donated his papers to Clemson in 1984 and set the precedent for a collection focus on parks and protected areas at Clemson that has led to the acquisition of papers from all subsequent directors but two. These papers span nearly a century of our nation's history, documenting the evolution of this high profile leadership position and recording the local, national, and global impact of America's National Parks--an idea that has brought people together for a century and continues to interest scholars and the general public alike. Clemson expects this project will help define the next 100 years of the National Park Service.

• Digitizing Against the Grain: Making Jewish Women's History Discoverable

  The Center for Jewish History will make discoverable a diverse representation of Jewish women's history by digitizing materials from across the archival, library and museum collections of four of its partner organizations: American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute and Yeshiva University Museum. The Digitizing Against the Grain project seeks to rescue the stories of Jewish women who were social pioneers, educators, philanthropists, communal leaders, artists, homemakers, activists, soldiers--and those whose identities and experiences defied categorization. Some of the women represented in the collections are well-known while others will receive serious attention only after these materials are digitized. In total, the Center will digitize 73 linear feet of 20 archival collections, 19 books, 7 volumes of periodicals, and 354 artworks, or approximately 92,174 images. The Digitizing Against the Grain project will create new opportunities for interdisciplinary research and exploration into Jewish women's history.

• International Whistleblowing Archive

  Our archiving plan involves contacting whistleblowers with the help of partnering organizations such as the Government Accountability Project and obtaining permission to archive their files. A lawyer will be retained to prepare contracts and review the donated documents. The Internet Archive service will convert the files to digital format for posting on our website by staff of the Internet Archive and volunteers. The information will then be available to people around the world, including many who lack the means to travel to a brick-and-mortar archive. We will also archive hundreds of articles and books collected by Don Soeken over a 35 year period.

• Rails Across the Continent: Digitized Maps of American Railroad Expansion

  Rails Across the Continent: Digitized Maps of American Railroad Expansion will digitize and describe an estimated 600 historical railroad maps in the collections of the University of Missouri-St. Louis' John W. Barringer III National Railroad Library and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Archives & Special Collections. Digitization will be conducted by the UNL Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and the Barringer Library over a three year period. The maps selected will complement those in the Railroad Maps, 1828-1900, Collection at the Library of Congress. Goals are to make significant visual resources relating to railroad lands and routes available to scholars and the public.

• Digitizing the collection of papers and artifacts pertaining to the history of Norwood, Massachusetts and continuing the work of local resident Fred Holland Day to narrate this history.

  The Norwood Historical Society began with the local history collection and papers of Fred Holland Day. We continue his legacy and want to expand the reach of our collection. We are currently undertaking a comprehensive review of our collection to better assess holdings. This collection is accessible to all interested in Norwood, Massachusetts history and to those interested in Fred Holland Day, photographer, publisher, and local historian. Already this collection has been the basis for several books (local history volumes, a biography of Day, and a memoir of life in Norwood), but it remains hidden and known only to a few. We want to digitize this collection to expand our reach and bring our collection into dialogue with other collections focused on local history and daily life primarily of the last two centuries.

• From the Cold War to the Wilderness: Digitizing the Audiovisual Archives of Senator Frank Church

  Over 1.5 years, Special Collections and Archives will digitize 1,162 audio items, 689 visual items, and 35,400 pages, and create closed-captioning from select items from four collections to create an online resource representing sixty years (1947-2014) of Idaho Senator Frank Church's political legacy. As Senator under six U.S. Presidents, Church was best-known as an early dissenter of the Vietnam War, facilitating the 1964 Wilderness Act, and chairing the mid-1970s Church Committee which investigated the FBI and CIA. Church was involved with many political issues such as: civil rights, wilderness, aging, health care, budget spending, campaigns, foreign relations, military, environment, labor, immigration, gun control, education, religion, and agriculture. Church's collection is frequently used by scholars, students, journalists, biographers, and documentarians. This project will advance scholarship by providing content on his high-demand subjects while bringing to the forefront the lesser-researched topics to demonstrate the breadth of Church's influence as a politician.

• Tracing Asian Art History in the West: Charles Lang Freer's Collections, Archival Papers and Library

  This two-year project will, through digitization, turn a hidden collection into an unrivalled online resource tracing the history of Western collections of Asian art, a subject of expanding scholarly interest. In 2014, the Freer and Sackler Galleries, the Smithsonian's Asian art museums, became the first Smithsonian unit to digitize its entire art collection. Now, founder Charles Lang Freer's purchase vouchers, extensive correspondence with collectors and dealers of the 19th century, and his library will be digitized and linked to his art collection. Volunteers with the Smithsonian's Transcription Center will transcribe Freer's correspondence, purchase records and auction catalogs and link the transcriptions to the object derivatives. While this alone would be a wealth of material, once the files are in the Smithsonian's Collections Search Center, the crowd will create metadata, helping to link derivatives to the online art object, greatly enriching the resource and opening new avenues of research.

• Alliance Community Collections, A Shared Digital Archive of Chicago's Ethnic Communities

  The Chicago Cultural Alliance (CCA) will support and assist in the item level cataloging of 2700 items at a minimum of 3 member sites over the next 3 years. This project will make available a portion of CCA's member collections from DANK Haus German American Cultural Center, the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, and the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture who embody Chicago's history and identity from the 1850s to present. Members will present their holdings of photographs, papers, material goods, and both social and fraternal organizational records on a shared website platform known as Alliance Community Collections. The site's virtual shared space will be a resource to publicly express the member's immigrant and migrant experiences to Chicago and the life of the communities that remained. This wholly unique site will allow for scholarly discoverability of these primary sources and lend to a new story of Chicago's history and people.

• Focusing the Lens: Creating Online Public Access to the Photographic Work of John Vachon in the Museum of the City of New York's LOOK Collection.

  The Museum of the City of New York seeks funding to increase public access to photographic material from the LOOK Collection over two years. This collection includes images for 2,242 LOOK magazine stories from 41 different photographers made between 1938 and 1968, and vividly documents the cultural transformation of the nation from World War II through the Cold War era. This project would allow the Museum to digitize and catalog photographic material--primarily negatives and contact sheets--from a selection of 54 assignments covering 50 individual topics from the work of staff photographer John Vachon (1914-1975), who documented a broad spectrum of topics over the course of his 25-year career with LOOK. Specifically, funds would provide for a review of nearly 18,500 images, in order to cull duplicates and technically poor or illegible images, resulting in digitization and free online access to approximately 11,100 images at http://collections.mcny.org.

• The Marian Anderson Papers: A Life in Sound

  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; 34 interviews; 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). We have designed a 12 month project and we are

• Edward L. Blake Jr. Landscape Architecture Collection of Slides.

  The Mississippi State University (MSU) Libraries and Department of Landscape Architecture are collaborating on a project to provide access to the hidden collection of images of nationally known landscape architect, planner, critic, and Professor Edward L. Blake Jr. (1947-2010). The Blake Collection has considerable humanities research and teaching potential because it is a significant collection of high-quality, award-winning landscape architecture works. Researchers and educators who are interested in an exploration of Blake's process of developing his ecologically-based designs, would have access to the presentation plans, construction documents, research, notes, and preliminary works of individual projects. The project team has determined that a grant is needed to assess, digitize, and made discoverable the roughly 42,000 35mm slides, providing physical and digital access to the collection.

• Digitizing La MaMa's Pushcart Years: A Unique History of the Off-Off-Broadway Movement

  Digitizing La MaMa's Pushcart Years explores the early history of New York City's Off-Off-Broadway movement (1961-1985) as documented in the collections of the Archives of the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Over the course of two years, La MaMa will digitize, preserve, and offer expanded online access to programs, posters, production notes, videos and other materials from our earliest "Pushcart" collection (1961-1985). Once digitized, this one-of-a-kind collection will offer a critical resource for scholars, educators, artists, and students interested in the emergence of modern American theater forms, experimental theatrical practice, and a wide range of other topics in 20th century US cultural history.

• New York City Municipal Archives' WNYC Moving Image Collection (1947-1996) Digitization and Online Access Project

  The NYC Department of Records & Information Services/Municipal Archives proposes to digitize approximately 100 hundred hours of moving images originally produced by WNYC-TV, the television station of the Municipal Broadcasting System, between 1949 and 1996. The footage will be selected from two series within the collection: 1) 16mm original reversal film (1949-1981); and 2) videotape (1982-1996). Its significance derives from the importance of New York City in national affairs, and from the additional dimension that moving images provide to documentation of a personality or an event. The value is enhanced by its uniqueness as most local news stations did not maintain their "archival" footage. The overall workplan includes digitization of the footage via vendor contract and creation of metadata by a digital archivist. Public access will be achieved via the Department of Records' website.

• Religion and Spirituality in the Chicano Movement: Las Hermanas & P.A.D.R.E.S. Collection (1971-1994)

  The Center for Mexican American Studies at Our Lady of the Lake University acquired the "Religion and Spirituality in the Chicano Movement: The Las Hermanas/P.A.D.R.E.S. Collection (1971-1994)" in 1994. The collection exists currently in hard copies and a small number of researcher-requested PDFs. Researchers accessing the records in person cite the early development and continuing influence of Las Hermanas/P.A.D.R.E.S. (Padres Asociados por Derechos Educativos y Socialesand) as critical to addressing the lack Chicana and Latina research material available for scholarly research and instruction in Theology, U.S. History, Chicano/a Studies, and Mexican American Studies. This project will digitize correspondence, newsletters, reports of national meetings, and photographs from the collection, making metadata and digital surrogates accessible to the public via an innovative mobile-optimized and geo-located website, which will also serve as a digital archive, exhibit, and device for expanding the collection as additional material becomes available.