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NHPRC Recommends Documentary Editing, Archival Projects Grants
At its November meeting, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) recommended $2.15 million for 23 projects in 13 states and the District of Columbia for preserving and publishing historical records.
Grant recommendations include $1.266 million to the projects annotating and publishing the papers of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and the documentary histories of the First Federal Congress and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
Five subventions were awarded to university presses to defray the cost of publishing new volumes of the papers of Washington, Madison, John Jay, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. The University of Wisconsin will receive funding to continue its work at the Institute for Editing Historical Documents, and the Papers of Andrew Jackson project at the University of Tennessee will be able to hire a new editing fellow.
A new pilot project to transcribe unpublished papers from the founding era of the nation was awarded to the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities on behalf of Documents Compass. This new effort will prepare verified and XML-encoded versions of unpublished documents and develop a workflow that can help the Founders editorial projects in their publishing process. The pilot project is the result of the Report to Congress by the Archivist of the United States on how to provide online access to the papers of the founding era.
Strategies and tools grants went to the Massachusetts Historical Society to enable the Adams papers project to digitize its paper-based control files and to the University of Michigan to develop standardized survey tools for government archives in collaboration with the University of North Carolina and the University of Toronto.
Six projects were recommended for digitization grants:
1. The University of Florida will digitize material from six collections relating to the exploration, development, and conservation of the Everglades from 1878-1929.
2. The Railroad Commission of Texas is digitizing about 120,000 pages, including oversized maps and plans, of documents dealing with the Texas oil boom of the 1930s.
3. A microfilm collection of the papers of Henry A. Wallace, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president and the Progressive party candidate for president in 1948, will be digitized at the University of Iowa.
4. A digital collection of the records of the American Social Health Association, held by the University of Minnesota, will give researchers access to documents from World I and World War II when the association was active in advising and treating military personnel on health issues.
5. The American Institute of Physics will digitize the papers of Samuel A. Goudsmit (1921-1979), the renowned physicist who headed the team investigating Germany’s progress in developing the atomic bomb during World War II.
6. Duke University is digitizing 24,000 photographs and slides that portray outdoor advertising and linking these images to an existing online database.
The Commission also approved grant announcements for new projects, and it welcomed Lucy Barber, Ph.D., as the new deputy executive director. Barber was formerly the director of technology initiatives at the NHPRC. After receiving a Ph.D. in history from Brown University, Barber was an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, and later an archivist with the California State Archives. She is the author of Marching on Washington: The Creation of a National Political Tradition.
Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein is the chairman of the NHPRC, and Kathleen Williams is its executive director. Members of the NHPRC include two presidential appointees and representatives from the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the Library of Congress, and from the following professional associations: the Association for Documentary Editing, the American Association for State and Local History, the American Historical Association, the National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society of American Archivists.
The next meeting at which the Commission will consider grant applications is scheduled for May 2009.
A complete list of all grants is here.
ARMA International Washington Policy Brief, December 2008
