March 2024 Awards in Preservation & Access  

Congratulations to the following organizations! Thirty-three awards were made for Humanities Collections and Reference Resources projects.

Academy Foundation – Los Angeles, CA

Award: $50,000       

A Foundations project to support the assessment, inventorying, and initial processing of the archival collection of documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple.

American Craft Council – Minneapolis, MN

Award: $45,742      

The digitization of American Craft magazine and regional craft assembly newsletters and creation of access to them in an online database.  

American Jewish Historical Society – New York, NY

Award: $349,300

The arrangement and description of the Regional Office Records series from the institutional archives of the Anti-Defamation League, as well as digitization of selected records for online access.  

Appalshop, Inc. – Whitesburg, KY

Award: $225,581

The treatment and digitization of 5,850 photonegatives from three collections dating from 1935–1995 documenting the social, cultural, and economic history of Appalachia, which were damaged in a major flood in 2022.  

Board of Trustees, University of Illinois – Champaign, IL

Award: $60,000

A Foundations project to develop a portal of women in science, starting with domestic science department collections held at the University of Illinois (UI) and University of Minnesota (UM). The work would include digitizing 21 linear feet of collections and creating partnerships, workshops, protocols, and machine-generated datasets for computational analysis.

CENTER – Sante Fe, NM

Award: $60,000

A Foundations project to prepare and test a prototype digital archive of twenty-first century lens-based photography, combining a dispersed collection of photographic images, artists’ statements, critical essays, and other contextual information into a single, accessible, and searchable online archive.  

Chittenden Community Television – Burlington, VT

Award: $49,927

A Foundations project to develop and pilot a digitization workflow for an audiovisual collection containing 40 years of public access community programming produced in Vermont beginning in the 1980s. The pilot would result in 100 digitized VHS tapes and newly documented protocols.  

Christiansburg Institute, Inc. – Christiansburg, VA

Award: $349,126

Cataloging and digitizing four collections on the Christiansburg Institute, an educational organization in Appalachia established by the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1866.  

Emory University – Atlanta, GA

Award: $349,929

The transcription and indexing of 117,500 hymns published between 1850 and 1889 in and for the southern United States.   

George Mason University – Fairfax, VA

Award: $350,000

Creating a digital archive of soldiers’ graffiti found in Civil War-era structures located in Northern Virginia. Images of the graffiti would be accompanied by related primary source materials and made available on a public website with contextual biographies and essays.  

Georgetown University – Washington, DC

Award: $343,529

The collecting of historical information primarily on Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico to be added to the States and Institutions of Governance in Latin America (SIGLA) database. The project would also retrieve and arrange HTML files from an obsolete SIGLA predecessor and make them available online.  

Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania – Pittsburgh, PA

Award: $50,000

A planning project to coordinate the work of scholars and cultural heritage organizations in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Viginia to identify and aggregate information and resources that document Italian American history in the region.    

Huguenot Historical Society of New Paltz New York Inc. – New Paltz, NY

Award: $349,955

The creation of 2,500 digital objects and 90 catalog records, as well as conservation and rehousing, of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collections from four of New Paltz’s cultural heritage institutions.  

Internet Archive – San Francisco, CA

Award: $345,960

The digitization of nine local history collections dating from 1839–2011 from seven historical organizations across the country, focusing on communities that are underrepresented in the historical record, resulting in 411,000 digital files.  

KVZK-TV – Pago Pago, AS

Award: $350,000

The digitization of 4,150 public television programs produced by the American Samoa affiliate station KVZK from 1965 to 2020.

La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Inc. – New York, NY

Award: $299,211

The cataloging of more than 90,000 digital items, including scripts, productions notes, correspondence, design files, programs, marketing materials, and audiovisual materials documenting 700 productions from 2005–2015 at La MaMa Theatre.

Michigan State University – East Lansing, MI

Award: $348,657

Expanding upon and enhancing an online repository of American cookbooks through digitization of new content, including texts from underrepresented communities, authoring contextual essays, and creating a new online linked data site.

Montclair State University – Montclair, NJ

Award: $349,971

A project to develop a bilingual, interactive platform for digital access to the documentation of monuments constructed on the island of Sicily during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries.  

Museum of the Aleutians – Unalaska, AK

Award: $349,457

A project to expand access to archaeological collections and histories of Tachiqalax, a Unangam village on Unalaska Island, Alaska.

Nevada State Library and Archives – Carson City, NV

Award: $59,999

A Foundations project to develop an inter-institutional pilot online portal containing more than 3,000 finding aids documenting Nevada history.  

Newberry Library – Chicago, IL

Award: $336,288

The digitization of a collection of linguistics materials related to approximately 300 languages spoken or formerly spoken by Indigenous peoples of North and Central America.

Northern Illinois University – DeKalb, IL

Award: $348,811

The indexing, describing, and digitization of approximately 300 audiovisual oral history interviews with Latinx populations in the Midwest that document their experiences and life histories in the region. The project would complete 33 full-text bilingual transcriptions and make them available through an open-access online database.

Norwegian-American Historical Association – Northfield, MN

Award: $297,452

The arrangement and description of five archival collections that document the relief efforts of Norwegian Americans for occupied Norway during World War II. More than 30,000 items would also be digitized and made available for research online.  

Ohio State University – Columbus, OH

Award: $316,626

Digitization of 194 serialized Victorian novels at the Harry Ransom Center, Princeton University Library, Ohio State University Library, and New York Public Library for inclusion in the HathiTrust, with enhanced metadata and a virtual library of this “serialized fiction” collection as well as addition to the Reading Like a Victorian website.  

Regents of the University of California, Irvine – Irvine, CA

Award: $350,000

The processing and digitization of 1,400 letters and 440 phone calls, as well as artwork, poetry, and physical objects, documenting the COVID-19 experience among incarcerated people in California prisons.

Regents of the University of California, Riverside – Riverside, CA

Award: $349,985

The cataloging and digitization of approximately 10,500 35 mm slides created by Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) members documenting the built environment across the United States and globally in the twentieth century, as well as the creation of approximately 12 finding aids. 

Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe – Mt. Pleasant, MI

Award: $323,786

A project to arrange, describe, digitize, and make accessible records pertaining to the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School (MIIBS) from the National Archives Records Administration (NARA) in Chicago.  

San Diego State University Foundation – San Diego, CA

Award: $336,762

Arrangement, description, and digitization of approximately 49,000 cultural heritage, social history, and U.S.-Mexico border region materials spanning the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries from the Archivo Histórico de Tijuana. The materials would be made available online through a bilingual portal.  

University of California, Santa Barbara – Santa Barbara, CA

Award: $349,993

The editing of 12,000 discographic records and digitization of 8,500 recordings by the American Record Corporation and its subsidiaries dating from 1922 to 1938.

University of Chicago – Chicago, IL

Award: $349,969

A project to build a platform that would bring together data from five digital humanities projects focused on the cultural history of late medieval and early modern Florence.

University of Delaware – Newark, DE

Award: $348,655

The reaccessioning, migration, and file conversion of more than 1,800 born digital photographs, AutoCAD files, and reports, as well as the digitization of 600 field notes and architectural drawings documenting historical vernacular architecture and buildings of the Mid-Atlantic region. Digital files would be included in multiple databases, including ArtStor and ArcGIS, for public access.

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts – Richmond, VA

Award: $349,813

The digitization, cataloging, rehousing, and creation of online access to 7,655 works on paper. The collection comprises primarily intaglio prints by more than 600 artists, with strengths in European and American prints from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries.

Washington and Jefferson College – Washington, PA

Award: $60,000

A planning project to develop new procedures and descriptive practices for making accessible a subset of the John Hoge Collection that contains land documents, correspondence, pamphlets, newspapers, and other ephemera from western Pennsylvania in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.