Hidden Collections Registry - Dev

Items

• Digital Access to the Speeches and Writings Collection of Luis A. Ferré Aguayo (1929-2002)

  The proposed project consists in the description, digitization and online access to the collection of speeches and writings of Luis A. Ferré Aguayo (1904-2003) produced between 1929 and 2002. Ferré was a prominent and towering figure in the history of Puerto Rico, leaving an important legacy in the fields of politics, education, philanthropy, and the arts, both in the island and the United States. The project will.promote best practices for ensuring the long-term availability and discoverability of this unique collection by making it available to the public as a source of research about the figure of Ferré, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean in the 20th century.

• AxleGrease / Public Access Collection (APAC); Squealer / Public Access Collection (SPAC)

  Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center Public Access Collection project's mission is to preserve, catalog, digitize and archive and make public Squeaky Wheel's AxleGrease and Squealer Public Access Collections (APAC & SPAC).

• Recordings of the Notre Dame Sophomore Literary Festival (1968, 1971, 1972, and 1979): Featuring Tom Stoppard, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, John Barth, and Others

  The Notre Dame Sophomore Literary Festival (SLF) brought to campus luminaries in poetry, prose, drama, and criticism, particularly in the event’s early years in the 1960s and ’70s. This project will digitize approximately 54 hours of SLF readings and lectures from 1968, 1971, 1972, and 1979, when speakers included Tom Stoppard, Allen Ginsberg, and John Barth, among other eminent writers. On open reel ¼” tapes, the unique value of these recordings to literary scholars of this period—for whom spoken word is an essential supplement to printed text—is at great risk of loss due to deterioration and obsolescence. The significance of these recordings is complemented by the University of Notre Dame Archives’ Raymond M. Funk, Jr. Papers, which feature correspondence with and photos of the SLF participants. After digitization by the NEDCC, these recordings will be made available for online listening and publicized in online finding aids.

• OHS Sound Recording Digitization Pilot Project

  The OHS Research Library proposes a pilot project to launch our efforts to digitize items in our extensive sound recording collection which are currently inaccessible due to format obsolescence and preservation concerns. We lack the equipment and expertise to conduct this work in house and qualified local services are equally lacking. The OHS sound recording collection contains thousands of magnetic tapes in a variety of formats that have long surpassed their life expectancy. Materials range widely in subject matter and are of high interest to scholars and the public. This proposal includes interviews and related soundscapes on a diverse set of topics, including Pacific Northwest Art, Russian Old Believers, and the timber industry. The digital files will be stored in the OHS digital preservation system and made available to the public via the OHS Digital Collections website. This project will also provide valuable experience for designing and executing future projects.

• Digitizing the New Bauhaus: Moholy-Nagy and the Institute of Design

  Illinois Institute of Technology, Paul V. Galvin Library, with the support of the Institute of Design, proposes a twelve-month project to digitize a substantial portion of the Institute of Design Records, 1937-ca. 1955, to celebrate the Bauhaus centennial (1919-2019). The Institute of Design has given permission to share this trove of materials online, which include departmental records, instruction material, correspondence, photographs, and departmental publications, which will be shared via an Islandora digital repository and will be discoverable through the collection’s finding aid. This project will make available a large collection of previously-hidden materials which are vital to the study of the Bauhaus movement throughout the world.

• Digitizing Storefront’s Archive for Web-based Public Access

  Storefront for Art and Architecture requests CLIR support for an 18 month project to digitize and disseminate 47 cubic feet (cft) of core program files from its archive. Storefront’s archive contains 115 cft of material documenting over three decades of the organization’s activities. This project will address the archive’s urgent needs to digitally transfer and preserve its audio-visual records, and to digitize its most important and requested program records for substantially improved public, web-based access. Proposed project activities will benefit Storefront's current, predominantly local audience of 20,000+ design professionals and significantly expand this audience to include design education communities nationally and internationally, as well as the general public. The project will result in preserved A/V media and digital records freely available via Google Cultural Institute, Storefront's website, and the Internet Archive. By working with these prominent digital platforms, Storefront intends to maximize the project’s cost effectiveness, efficiency and impact.

• Georgetown University Forum: Preserving Historic Radio

  The Georgetown University Forum: Preserving Historic Radio pilot project will reformat, preserve, and make available the earliest audio recordings of this long-running public affairs program. A sample of 1947 programs includes: “Student Action in the United States,” “States' Rights,” “What is the Veterans Administration Doing for Veterans in College?” and “Should Washington Have Home Rule?” Many topics are as timely today as they were when they were originally broadcast. When these recordings are reformatted and made available, students and scholars will be able to consider today’s issues in a broader historical context, as well as to learn more about student engagement and attitudes over the decades. The entire collection has been thoroughly curated by archival staff, and metadata has already been created; however, the content is currently completely inaccessible due to brittleness of the tapes, so these unique and powerful recordings are at risk of being lost forever.

• The Institute for Advanced Study Squeeze Collection of Athenian Inscriptions

  This two-year project aims to digitize the Athenian inscriptions from the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) Squeeze Collection, the world’s second largest collection of ca. 70,000 squeezes of Greek and Latin inscriptions. Squeezes of stone inscriptions are accurate, three-dimensional, mirror image impressions of inscriptions. Scholars worldwide use them continually to produce new readings and a more accurate chronology of texts, and to train students. The IAS Collection, which currently can only be consulted on campus, is particularly rich in Athenian inscriptions and contains squeezes of inscriptions that have been destroyed or lost. The digitization of the Athenian squeezes will preserve these delicate prized resources; connect the images of the squeezes with their published inscription texts through metadata creation; make them accessible online for free and unlimited use by researchers, epigraphy teachers, and students across the globe; and enhance the study of primary sources for every aspect of Classical culture.

• Do No Harm: Discovering the Hidden History of Occupational and Environmental Health in the Dr. Robert A.Kehoe Collection

  Hosted at the University of Cincinnati Libraries, this project will provide digitized images with metadata for over 160,000 pages of manuscripts, diaries and other primary sources from the Kehoe collection. Dr. Kehoe was the pioneer in early lead studies and was considered by many to be the ‘father of environmental and occupational health.’ The project materials encompass lead paint and toys; occupational medicine with regards to lead toxicity exposure and cancer; environmental policy and law; ethical considerations - relationship of academic research institutions and industry; and personal diaries of lead exposed study subjects by Dr. Kehoe and Kettering Laboratory. This unique collection will fill the historical gaps in the areas of occupational and environmental health while highlighting the ways in which independent companies operated in an era absent federal regulations. Further, in light of modern environmental health concerns (Flint, Michigan) the collection will increase the accessibility of relevant historical records.

• Digitization and Dissemination of Technically Problematic KUAC-FM Radio (Alaska) Programs (1979-1997)

  One hundred and twenty-six hours from the nearly 950 open-reel audio tapes from the KUAC FM Audiotapes Collection held in the Alaska and Polar Regions Collections & Archives at the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), have been selected to be digitized by the Northeast Document Conservation Center using their high-touch, high-quality technical approach. The digital recordings will be available through the UAF Library Catalog via WorldCat for anyone with an Internet connection. The collection will be of interest to historians, scientists and researchers around the globe. Topics of national and international significance include Arctic policy, global warming, effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, whaling, dog mushing, interviews with well-known Alaska Native leaders and programs about youth, racism and women in the political process, just to name a few.

• Citizens’ Council Radio Forums: Digitizing the Interviews of Segregationist Politicians, 1957-1966

  The Citizens’ Council, founded in 1954 following the Brown v. Board decision, was very powerful in working to maintain segregation in Mississippi. They spread their message using several strategies, including television and radio segments; the Citizens’ Council Radio Forum ran from 1957-1966 and features dozens of national and Mississippi politicians, including James Eastland, George Wallace, and Strom Thurmond, and covered topics ranging from reaction to the Civil Rights Acts to the fear of Communism. The Citizens’ Council continues to be a topic of interest for scholars and Mississippi State University’s Citizens’ Council and Civil Rights era collections are heavily used by researchers from all over the country. Mississippi State is the only repository who has the Radio Forums and a grant would allow us to digitize the tapes and make them available to researchers in the form of a searchable digital collection on our existing library website.

• Preserving the Interview Recordings of Mel Gussow, American and British Theater Critic

  The Harry Ransom Center proposes a seven-month pilot project to outsource the digitization of 75 cassette audiotape interviews recorded by Mel Gussow (1933-2005), renowned New York Times American and British theater critic. Gussow was among the first to legitimize the off-off-Broadway movement and bring broad attention via the Times to early productions at LaMaMa, the Caffe Cino, and the Living Theatre—discovering writers such as Lanford Wilson and Sam Shepard, and actors Kevin Kline, Meryl Street, and Sigourney Weaver. Gussow also authored and edited nine books, including a biography of playwright Edward Albee and four on his conversations with playwrights Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter, and Tom Stoppard. The digitized interview recordings, made available to the public via the Center’s digital collections portal, CONTENTdm, will allow a multi-disciplinary research and teaching community to hear candidly from a range of figures representing forty years of American and British theater.

• W. W. Law Collection Audio Recordings Preservation

  The City of Savannah Research Library & Municipal Archives (RLMA), partnering with the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC), will reformat at-risk, rare audio recordings (34 open -reel tapes; estimated 43 hours; dating 1955-1978, undated) from the W. W. Law Collection. Westley Wallace “W. W.” Law (1923-2002) was a prominent Civil Rights leader, local historian, historic preservationist and community leader in Savannah, Georgia. As president of the Savannah Branch NAACP from 1950-1976, his collection includes a variety of material related to the Civil Rights movement, not only in Savannah but throughout the United States. The audio included in this project include speeches by NAACP leaders, Civil Rights events, recordings of regional musicians, and local history programs. They will be valuable to researchers from a broad array of disciplines, including local and national scholars of American, social or music history, local community members, biographers, and students, among others.

• Preserving An American Treasure: The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association's Early Records & Archives from 1852 to 1951

  The MVLA has been a pathfinder for the American preservation movement. This two-year project will allow MVLA to immediately open up our own early history, as we digitize, organize, describe, and make publicly accessible about 7,000 items (largely pre-1900). Primary source material includes manuscripts, letters, newspaper clippings, and images related to the rich history of the MVLA. The archival collection will be processed to include the most modern of searchable finding aids, making this fascinating story widely available to benefit scholars, teachers, students, and life-long learners. This project illuminates an institutional history with a very human story. Founded and governed by resourceful women, the MVLA forged a new industry for protecting America's cultural and historical heritage, while fulfilling their mission to preserve the legacy of George Washington's leadership and character along with his iconic home. The MVLA's patriotic leadership and resolve, individually and collectively, represents an important American achievement.

• The Mississippi State University Extension Digitization Project

  Special Collections at Mississippi State University Libraries is seeking to process and digitize all materials relating to the Mississippi State University Extension formerly known as the "Mississippi Cooperative Extension Service" or MCES. (It will hereby be referred to as the "Extension" in this application) This project involving Mississippi's agricultural materials is expected to last 24 months and will encompass 1100 published Extension Bulletins, more than 2000 photographsand 159 manuscript collections ranging from 1920 to 1980. Additional genres of materials include directors' files, newspaper clippings, correspondence, reports, record books, secretary books, meeting minutes, programs, scrapbooks, ledgers, and 4-H memorabilia. This project will promote the research and advancement of agriculture throughout Mississippi by placing prior technology, challenges, and history of the Extension online.

• Entrenched Ephemera: A Multilingual Collection of First World War Postcards, Posters, Photos, Pamphlets, and Scrapbooks from the Blavatnik Archive and McGill University Library and Archives

  The Blavatnik Archive Foundation and the McGill University Library and Archives (as a unit of The Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning/McGill University) propose a 24-month collaborative project to digitize, describe, and make freely available online 22,839 pieces of World War I ephemera. These multilingual postcards, posters, photos, pamphlets, and scrapbooks provide personal glimpses into life on the battlefield and the home front in Europe and North America. The postcards in particular will provide fresh insights into a continent at war, straight from the pen of those who lived it. In consultation with end users, we will develop rich metadata and harness the strength of crowdsourcing for the transcription and translation of the postcards. The material will be made significantly more accessible than if just digitized, allowing researchers from multiple disciplines and genealogists to mine this content deeply and trace communication networks and family members spread throughout the conflict.

• Fabrica: Digitizing the Fiber Arts Artifacts in University of La Verne’s Cultural & Natural History Collections—Indigenous Textiles, Baskets, Looms and other Woven Artifacts From Africa to the Americas

  Proposed is a two-year project creating a publicly accessible digital resource for the fiber arts collections in University of La Verne’s Cultural & Natural History Collections. The Collections includes indigenous African and American textiles, baskets, looms and other woven artifacts, plus the unpublished manuscripts on Native American textiles by Esther Funk. Project activities include 1) photographing, digitizing and making discoverable online the CNHC fiber arts artifacts; 2) annotating the accompanying online catalog; 3) developing online collaborative exhibits with other institutions; 4) assuring availability of the digital resource for the broader community of students, researchers, scholars, artists, educators, heritage preservationists, curiosity seekers, and local- and global communities. Increased access, discoverability and visibility of this “hidden collection” supports the university’s educational mission and its core values of community engagement and lifelong learning. Digitization further ensures the continued integrity of the Collections’ fiber arts content, and moves the Collections into the 21st century.

• In Their Own Words: The Hidden Recordings of Folk Artists' Interviews From the Rosenak Collection at the American Folk Art Museum Archives

  The American Folk Art Museum seeks to digitize the audio cassettes of the Charles B. and Janice M. Rosenak Collection. The Rosenaks were pioneers of folk art. From 1967-1988 they toured the country to document self-taught artists—primarily African American and Native American—whose work was unknown to a wider audience. They recorded interviews with the artists and photographed them in their studios and art environments throughout the Southeast, Appalachia, and New Mexico. The artists they documented comprise some of the most iconic artists in the museum’s collection: Howard Finster, Sam Doyle, William Dawson, Lee Goodie, Malcah Zeldis, Leroy Felipe Archuleta and more. Primary source materials for these artists are rare; all are deceased today. The audio collection consists of 30 cassette tapes with 26 artists speaking about their work in their own words. These tapes have not been played since coming into the collection of the Museum in 1988.

• Uncovering Early Artists’ Books: Digitizing The Franklin Furnace Artists’ Books Vertical Files

  This two-year project will digitize and make available unique compilations of analog documents uncovering “behind the scenes” information describing early artists’ books. The collection, named the Franklin Furnace Artists’ Books Vertical Files is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) and was created by Franklin Furnace (FF). The project will produce item level cataloging records of: 1. Artist files that contain one-of-a kind documents handwritten by the artists and other period materials that reveal the artist’s motivations and milieu; 2. Exhibition files of one-person and group shows; 3. Objects previously cataloged as artists’ books. The materials will be shared via the Franklin Furnace website, MoMA’s Dadabase, and Artstor. Creation of this online resource will foster innovative research for academics and others working with the same or similar titles, thus providing long-term benefits to studies of artists’ books and visual culture in the humanities nationally and internationally.

• Rediscovering Our Roots: Digitizing Sound Portraits Productions Materials

  StoryCorps requests a grant to digitize analog media materials produced by Sound Portraits Productions (SPP). SPP was an independent production company formally established by StoryCorps’ founder and MacArthur Genius, Dave Isay, in 1994. Starting in the late 1980s, SPP produced over 70 audio documentaries that tell the stories of diverse and underrepresented people from across the nation, whose stories would otherwise have been excluded from the historical record. The masters and related source materials for these groundbreaking and award-winning documentaries represent a unique resource for educators, scholars, producers, and the public. However, most remain un-digitized and face decay and obsolescence. Support from CLIR will enable StoryCorps to digitize part of this collection and share these rare audio materials with generations to come.

• “The Euphrates to the Thames: Preserving intellectual discourse from Arab and Islamic diaspora in late 20th century London, selected recordings from the Mohamed Makiya Archive at MIT Libraries.”

  MIT Libraries has acquired 90’ of audiocassette recordings from the Mohamed Makiya estate. Makiya was a renowned Iraqi architect, who lived his later years in London in exile. In 1986, Makiya founded the Kufa Gallery in London as a diwaniya for Arab culture, a place for social and cultural gatherings. His aim was to keep the Arab and Islamic intellectual, artistic, and humanistic traditions alive. Recordings of Arab musicians, artists, and humanities scholars at the Kufa Gallery and elsewhere are included in the collection. These rare recordings contain an endangered Arab intellectual and cultural heritage at great risk of being lost. The MIT Libraries seeks to preserve these recordings and publish them on the open access library web site Archnet. Activities will include NEDCC digital preservation, transferal of files to MIT’s storage server with back-up, editing tapes as needed, publishing on Archnet, and internationally publicizing their accessibility.

• Locus Photo & Ephemera Digitization Project

  The project comprises digitizing, accessioning, and cataloging the Locus Photo & Ephemera Collection, with corresponding metadata for each digital file. Images will be hosted online, on dedicated archive pages available to the public through an LSFF website. With approximately 35,000 pieces (35 linear feet) -- 30,000 photos and 5,000 letters -- the collection offers a visual historical record of the genre’s growth over the last 60 years, emphasizing the lives of the authors, editors, and publishers of the works themselves. In a time when the study of these fields is burgeoning in academia, these otherwise unavailable photographs will provide a more complete understanding of the history of speculative fiction, and the individuals who created it -- lauded and respected authors and editors such as Isaac Asimov, Ian & Betty Ballantine, Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Gene Wolfe, and more.

• The Sociology of Knowledge in Classical and Molecular Genetics: The 20th Century Scientific Networks of Barbara McClintock and the Jackson Laboratory

  The American Philosophical Society (APS), one of the largest repositories for the study of genetics and eugenics in the United States, plans to reformat, digitize, and make accessible 80 cassette tapes containing oral histories of scientists involved in the development of classical and molecular genetics during the 20th century. The selected materials focus on some of the most important trends in the 21st-century study of the history of science: the role of social networks, economic support for scientists, and women in science. They include interviews with Nobel prize-winning maize cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock (1978-1980) as well as her professional colleagues. To extend the story into the later 20th century, nearly 50 oral histories from the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, produced in 1985, offer an extended view of the history of genetics as a field of molecular biology, especially as it relates to cancer.

• The Vermont Project (1944-1976): An Experiment in Building Race Relations

  The Vermont Project Collection documents a little known initiative that started as a collaboration between two pastors, the Reverends Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. of New York City’s Abyssinian Baptist Church and Reverend Ritchie Low of the Congregational Church of Vermont. It was an experiment in race relations in which black children from the Abyssinian Baptist Church, other Harlem churches, and the general Harlem community were the two-week summer guests in Vermont homes. Many of the youngsters had not traveled beyond their Harlem community and many of the Vermonters had never seen a black person. The purpose of the program was to ascertain how the two races could learn from one another. The 1944-1976 collection includes detailed project reports, along with the extensive preparatory planning; newspaper and magazine articles; photographs; a film documenting the project; and scrapbooks. In the 1940s, the Project was the subject of both national and international reports.

• History Revealed: The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' First 60 Years

  "History Revealed: The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' First 60 Years," will provide unprecedented access to the rich stories of the VMFA, the nation's first state-supported art museum. Through a collaboration with the Library of Virginia, which holds the museum's earliest records, the Director’s Correspondence (1933-1977), Exhibition Files (1936-1995) and Trustee Minutes (1932-1983) collections will be digitized in their entirety. Online public access to the digitized collections will be provided by the Library of Virginia, while VMFA will create five digital exhibitions related to important historical topics, including: Segregation during the time of Massive Resistance; Female Leadership from WWII through the 1960s; Fellowship Awards Supporting Virginia’s Artists (Cy Twombly, Benjamin Wigfall and Julien Binford); VMFA’s Artmobile: Bringing Arts Education to Virginia’s Rural Communities; and Landmark Exhibitions: American Painting 1950, Design in Scandinavia, Sport and the Horse, Painting in the South, German Expressionist Art, and Spirit of the Motherland.