Division of Preservation and Access
The Division of Preservation and Access plays a major role in addressing the physical deterioration of humanities collections in America's libraries, museums, archives, and historical organizations. At risk are significant portions of the nation's cultural legacy. The division also makes grants for the creation of significant reference works -- dictionaries, atlases, encyclopedias, and humanities databases -- that preserve underpinnings of knowledge here and abroad. Also supported is intellectual access to collections that are important for research, education, and public programming in the humanities.
In fiscal year 1999, the division completed the eleventh year of a program for the preservation of brittle books and serials. When the four microfilming projects funded this year -- and those that have been undertaken with NEH support at twenty-eight other libraries and library consortia -- are completed, the intellectual content of approximately 854,000 embrittled volumes will be preserved.
Newspapers chronicle the daily life of America's citizens across the country. They document the civic, legal, historical, and cultural events that have occurred in every region of the nation during the past three hundred years. All fifty states, two U.S. territories, and the District of Columbia are now involved in the Endowment's United States Newspaper Program, a national initiative to catalog and preserve on microfilm the country's newspapers on a state-by-state basis. At the conclusion of currently funded NEH newspaper projects, more than 139,000 newspaper titles will be available in a national database and approximately fifty-nine million deteriorating newspaper pages will have been transferred onto microfilm.
Grants made in fiscal year 1999 also preserve, stabilize, and provide intellectual access to a variety of museum, archival, and other collections that are important for the study of American history, including American Indian and African American history and culture; folk art and music; the history of physics; Japanese history; and African, Asian, and Pacific ethnology. The grants cover preservation and access activities at ninety-five institutions in thirty-seven states.
Among the research tools and reference works that received support in fiscal year 1999 are projects to create the Dictionary of American Regional English at the University of Wisconsin, the creation of a database of Golden Age Spanish poetry at the University of Denver, and the completion of an encyclopedia of the American Great Plains at the University of Nebraska.
To foster the development of the next generation of libraries, the NEH has joined other federal agencies in sponsoring the Digital Library Initiative, which is conducted by the National Science Foundation. In fiscal year 1999, the Endowment's participation in this initiative supported six projects that will foster the preservation and accessibility of humanities resources in digital form. At Cornell University, a team of computer scientists and librarians is designing a model system for ensuring the integrity, security, and preservation of digitized collections. At Michigan State University, engineers and humanities faculty are creating a fully searchable, online database of historic voice recordings. At the University of Kentucky, a professor of English and a computer visualization expert are developing digital techniques for recovering text from early manuscripts that have been damaged by fire, water, and aging. Scholars at the University of California-Davis are creating a searchable audio archive of the Judeo-Spanish folkloric tradition. A classicist at Tufts University, in conjunction with a computer scientist and a cognitive psychologist, is creating a digital humanities library, which will contain literary, historical, and archaeological materials on topics ranging from ancient Egypt to nineteenth-century London. Fully searchable audio and lyric files for nineteenth-century American sheet music are being made accessible through a website created by librarians and music scholars at Johns Hopkins University. These projects will stimulate new ways of using humanities collections and promote their broad accessibility via the Internet.
Jeff Field
Director (acting)
Division of Preservation and Access
AMIGOS Bibliographic Council, Inc.
Dallas, TX Thomas F. Clareson
$601,909 Regional Preservation
Field Services and Digital Imaging Workshops in the Southwest
Albany Institute of History and Art
Albany, NY Tammis K. Groft
$340,120 Relocating and Rehousing Material Culture Collections
American Film Institute
Los Angeles, CA Patricia K. Hanson
$45,000* AFI Catalog of Feature Films, 1951-60
American Film Institute
Los Angeles, CA Patricia K. Hanson
$110,000* AFI Catalog of
Feature Films, 1951-60
American Institute of Physics
College Park, MD R. Joseph Anderson
$78,381 Creating a Union Database of History of Science Finding Aids
American Museum of Natural History
New York, NY Peter Siegel
$169,768 Creating an Image
Database of the Museum's African Ethnographic Collection
Amistad Research Center
New Orleans, LA Donald E. DeVore
$170,000 Arranging, Describing, and Creating Access to Records Related to the Modern Civil Rights Movement
Brown University
Providence, RI Robert B. Litchfield
$70,420 Creating a Database of
Office Holders for the Florentine Republic, 1282-1532
Brown University
Providence, RI Allen Renear
$33,037* A Textbase of Pre-Victorian Women's Writing
Columbia University
New York, NY Angela Giral
$180,000 Conversion to Machine-Readable Form of the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, 1934-76
Columbia University
New York, NY Ehsan O. Yarshater
$135,000* Encyclopaedia Iranica
Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs
Warm Springs, OR Henry S. Palmer
$38,000 Creation of a Text Collection and Grammar to the Wasco Indian Language
Connecticut Historical Society
Hartford, CT Gary Wait
$157,920 Cataloging the
Connecticut Broadsides
Conservation Center for Art
and Historical Artifacts
Philadelphia, PA Virgilia Rawnsley
$30,000* Regional Preservation Field Services in the Mid-Atlantic States
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY Anne R. Kenney
$223,697 Workshops on Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives
CUNY Research Foundation/
Hunter College
New York, NY Nelida Perez
$223,616 Arranging and Describing Records on Puerto Rican Migration History
East Tennessee State University
Johnson City, TN Jean H. Speer
$82,600 Encyclopedia of Appalachia
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL Rodney D. Anderson
$114,959 Creating a Database
of Census Records for Guadalajara, 1821-22
Graduate School and
University Center, CUNY
New York, NY Dee L. Clayman
$169,600* Database of Classical Bibliography
Hebrew Union College
Cincinnati, OH Stephen A. Kaufman
$42,500* The Comprehensive
Aramaic Lexicon
Hoover Institution
Stanford, CA Charles G. Palm
$287,440 Preserving and Creating Access to Russian Emigre Archives
Huntington Library
San Marino, CA Laura Stalker
$98,791 Art Education in America: Cataloging and Preserving the Diana Korzenik Collection
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN Albert Valdman
$200,000 Creating a Database of Lexical and Lexicological Research
on Louisiana French
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Boston, MA Lyle Grindle
$488,800 Installation of Fire Alarm and Electronic Security Systems for
the Protection of the Museum's Collections
Library of Virginia
Richmond, VA Edward Campbell
$493,959* Virginia Newspaper Project: Cataloging
Maine State Museum
Augusta, ME Julia A. Hunter
$152,280 Documenting the Museum's Domestic Life Collections
Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
Cambridge, MA Peter S. Donaldson
$10,000* The Shakespeare Electronic Archive Project: Phase III
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI Lynne Swanson
$161,072 Purchasing Storage Furniture and Rehousing the Museum's Ethnographic Collections
New York Public Library
New York, NY Mary B. Bowling
$133,440 Arranging, Describing, Preserving, and Improving Access to the National Civic Federation Records
New York Public Library
New York, NY Heike Kordish
$944,571 Preservation Microfilming of Latin American Collections
Newberry Library
Chicago, IL James R. Grossman
$50,000* The Encyclopedia of
Chicago History
Northeast Document
Conservation Center
Andover, MA Ann E. Russell
$109,245* Regional Preservation
Field Services in the Northeast
President and Fellows
of Harvard College
Cambridge, MA Sidney Verba
$939,900 Preservation Microfilming of Collections in the History of Science
School of American Research
Santa Fe, NM Duane Anderson
$28,472 Installation of a Security System to Protect Historic and Contemporary Native American
Art Collections
Shelburne Museum
Shelburne, VT Richard L. Kerschner
$700,000 Improving Fire Prevention, Lighting, and Security for Material Culture Collections
Society of Architectural Historians
Chicago, IL Damie Stillman
$113,064* Buildings of the United States
Spelman College
Atlanta, GA Beverly G. Sheftall
$219,564* Historically Black Colleges and Universities Archive Survey:
Phase III
Stanford University
Stanford, CA Charles G. Palm
$36,987* Preservation Microfilming
of the Archival Collections on Poland at the Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Stanford, CA John R. Perry
$10,000* Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR Mary C. Suter
$193,548 Improving Storage of Archaeological, Ethnographic,
and Historical Collections
University of California
Berkeley, CA Charles B. Faulhaber
$341,040 Digitizing Medieval Manuscripts and Creating a
World Union Catalog
University of California
Berkeley, CA Patrick Kirch
$700,000 Purchasing Storage Furniture and Rehousing the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology Basketry and Textile Collections
University of California
Berkeley, CA Edith R. Kramer
$29,100* Cinefiles: Digitization
of Moving Image Documentation
University of California
Berkeley, CA Gerald Lowell
$421,836 Arrangement and Description of Bay Area Architectural Archives: The First Bay Tradition
University of California
Berkeley, CA Peter Lyman
$10,000* The Making of America II Testbed Digitization Project
University of California
Berkeley, CA James A. Matisoff
$308,822 Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (Stedt)
University of California
Riverside, CA Henry L. Snyder
$350,000* Completion of an International Union Catalog and Bibliography of Early English Serials
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL Sherry Byrne
$882,366 Preservation Microfilming of Collections on the History of Religion
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL Harry Hoffner
$360,000 The Chicago Hittite Dictionary
University of Denver
Lakewood, CO Ralph A. DiFranco
$160,040 A Database of Spanish Golden Age Verse
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Honolulu, HI Patricia G. Steinhoff
$154,201 Preserving and Providing Access to the Takazawa Collection on Social Movements in Postwar Japan
University of Illinois
Urbana, IL Sharon E. Clark
$400,000* Illinois Newspaper
Project: Cataloging
University of Maryland
College Park, MD H. Robert Cohen
$172,161 Compilation of the Repertoire International de
la Presse Musicale
University of Maryland
College Park, MD Desider L. Vikor
$300,000 Preservation Microfilming
of the Gordon W. Prange Collection Newspaper and Newsletter Holdings: Phase II
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI Jeffrey G. Heath
$42,667 Creating a Grammar, Dictionary, and Texts of Tamashek (Tuareg), a Berber Language of
the Sharan
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI John W. Price-Wilkin
$25,000* Middle English Compendium
University of Nebraska
Lincoln, NE David Wishart
$138,524 Encyclopedia of
the Great Plains
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM Stephen J. Rollins
$328,564 Online Archive of
New Mexico
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC Richard J. Talbert
$7,611* Atlas of the Greek and Roman World
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR Mark Watson
$600,000* Oregon Newspaper Project: Cataloging and Microfilming
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA Anthony Kroch
$126,993 Creating an Electronic Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English, 1500-1710
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA Albert L. Lloyd
$109,859 Etymological Dictionary
of Old High German
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA Jeremy A. Sabloff
$700,000 Purchasing Storage Furniture and Rehousing the Museum's Archaeological Textiles
and Ethnographic Collections
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA Nancy M. Shawcross
$62,720 Arranging and Describing the Leopold Stokowski Collection, 1909-77
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA JeanAnn Croft
$217,189 Preservation Microfilming of Bolivian Monographs
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC Elizabeth P. Bilderback
$106,778 Preserving and Providing Intellectual Access to the South Carolinian Photographic Collection
University of Texas
Austin, TX David B. Gracy II
$18,050* Graduate Training for Preservation and Conservation of Library and Archives Materials
University of Texas
Austin, TX David B. Gracy II
$250,000 Graduate Training for Preservation and Conservation of Library and Archives Materials
University of Toronto
Ontario, Canada Antonette Healey
$133,000* Dictionary of Old English
University of Wisconsin
Madison, WI Frederic G. Cassidy
$201,115* Dictionary of American Regional English
University of Wisconsin
Madison, WI Joan H. Hall
$350,000 Dictionary of American Regional English
University of Wisconsin
Madison, WI John J. Nitti
$281,079 Creation of the Lexico Hispanoamericano on CD-ROM: 19th and 20th Centuries
University of Wisconsin
Madison, WI David Woodward
$191,469* History of Cartography
Upper Midwest Conservation Association
Minneapolis, MN Richard C. Borges
$337,487 Regional Preservation
Field Services in the Upper Midwest
*Federal Matching Funds