$216,000 Grant from Mellon Foundation to Help Library Investigate Digitizing Archives
March 22 - The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library $216,000 over two years for the project "Extending the Reach of Southern Sources: Proceeding to Large-Scale Digitization of Manuscript Collections."
The library's Southern Historical Collection and Carolina Digital Library will use the grant to plan for digitizing vast collections of unique historical materials and presenting them online. The project will provide methods for managing large-scale digitization of entire collections in the Southern Historical Collection, one of the world's largest repositories for original materials that document the southern United States.
The grant, awarded in December 2006, responds to growing demand by researchers for electronic access to comprehensive archival collections, said UNC's Richard Szary, director of the Louis Round Wilson Library and associate university librarian for special collections. "These are the raw materials for research in history, the humanities and the social sciences. To have them online would open up tremendous research opportunities."
The digitization of archival collections presents challenges not shared with large-scale book scanning projects, such as the efforts by Internet search company Google to scan millions of books from research libraries.
"Copies of books are generally similar to one another and predictable in their physical characteristics and composition," said Szary. Archival items, on the other hand, are unique by definition, and the interrelationships among documents can be just as important to researchers as the individual documents. "We need to develop techniques that preserve the context of each item and that help researchers understand the circumstances in which the person or organization created the materials," said Szary.
Large archival repositories are additionally characterized by the variability, fragility and sheer volume of the materials they house. UNC's Southern Historical Collection contains roughly 18 million items organized into thousands of collections. Handwritten letters and diaries, drawings, photos, maps, typed correspondence, official records, audio-visual materials, electronic files, and materials that range in date from colonial days to the present are all included. Determining the best techniques for digital capture, storage, navigation and presentation will be an extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive process.
The Southern Historical Collection is well poised to embark on this mission of discovery, said Tim West, curator of manuscripts and director of the Southern Historical Collection. "The field of Southern studies is especially vigorous. Scholars of the South are excited and engaged. They recognize UNC as one of the nation's leading archives in this area and they are eager to work with us."
The Mellon-funded project will provide a model for "scholar-driven digitization," said West, by inviting a group of scholars and technologists who will advise investigators on the materials most needed in digital form and the ways those materials are most likely to be used.
The Mellon Foundation grant will allow the library to realize six goals that pave the way for digitization of the Southern Historical Collection and similar collections. Investigators will:
