The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the primary source of federal funds for the nation’s museums and libraries, announces the 51 institutions receiving National Leadership Grants (NLG) totaling $17,894,475. Projects by these institutions will advance the ability of museums and libraries to preserve culture, heritage, and knowledge while enhancing learning.
For a complete list of National Leadership Grants (organized by State) and descriptions visit this page.
Here are just a few of the projects that received grants. In many cases, the abstracts below are not full text.
+ The Boston TV News Digital Library: 1960-2000
The WGBH Media Library and Archives, in collaboration with Northeast Historic Film, Cambridge Community Television, and the Boston Public Library, will develop the Boston TV News Digital Library: 1960–2000, the first online resource offering a city’s commercial, noncommercial, and community cable TV news heritage to educators and the public. The purpose of the collaboration is to use, test, and demonstrate open source tools to assist custodians of similar resources, while creating an online library offering 40 years of urban moving image materials, resulting in approximately 70,000 news records…
+ Creating a Virtual Terrapin Station: Blending Traditional & Socially Constructed Archives for Research, Teaching
The University of California, Santa Cruz Campus will digitize materials from its Grateful Dead Archive and make them available in a unique and cutting-edge Web site, the Virtual Terrapin Station. The Virtual Terrapin Station will provide access to Grateful Dead Archive materials and tools to facilitate public contributions to the archive. This project will enable the university to convert a significant part of a traditional archive to digital form and make it available online while simultaneously experimenting with the impact of fostering, creating, and curating a large, socially constructed archive. The project will develop a click-through permissions form for content contributors and will extend the reach of the Grateful Dead Archive to the academic research community. It will also implement and contribute to the development of the IMLS-funded exhibition tool, Omeka
+ Creating Global Learning and Cultural Centers through Advancing Digital Resources in our School Libraries
Bridgeport Roman Catholic Diocesan Corp., working with the State Library of Connecticut, will investigate strategies to enhance parochial school libraries and build strategic partnerships with other school libraries and public libraries. They will explore issues around broadcast redistribution of synchronous and asynchronous learning tools, the capacity to network library holdings and access workflows, and resource sharing among partner institutions. The goal is to develop a plan to make the school libraries a hub through which the individual student on a laptop, or a team working in a connected classroom, can access international learners and global resources.
Many More Entries After the Jump
+ Collaborative Planning (Co-Plan) to Support an Infrastructure for Humanities Scholarship
The Council on Library and Information Resources, in partnership with Tufts University, will lead a collaborative planning process engaging scholars and academic librarians to examine the services and digital objects classicists have developed, their future research needs, and the roles of libraries and other curatorial institutions in fostering the infrastructure on which the core intellectual activities of classics and many other disciplines depend. On the basis of extensive consultation with librarians, archivists, and humanities scholars, they will identify and describe a set of shared services layered over a distributed storage architecture that is seamless to end users, allows multiple contributors, and leverages institutional resources and facilities…
+ Cultural Imaginings: the creation of the Arab World in the Western Mind
The libraries of George Washington University and Georgetown University will digitize their jointly held collections of Western literature on the Middle East and works by Middle East and North African authors comprising more than 2,500 volumes. The collections will be freely accessible to scholars and the general public worldwide. As part of the digitization process, the project team will test and evaluate the performance of a Kirtas 2400 book scanner and assess its capacity to produce high-quality/high-volume digital scans of bound volumes. Both libraries will produce enriched metadata records necessary for discovery, access, and long-term management and preservation of the digital content created, using robust metadata standards.
+ ASERL Collaborative Federal Depository Project
The Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL), in partnership with the University of Kentucky and the University of South Carolina, will create collaborative centers of excellence among federally designated regional depository libraries to improve access to federal government publications and create a model for improving depository library services and operations. Working within the current legal mandate and policies of the Federal Depository Library Program, ASERL and its partners will test a plan to create a comprehensive collection of tangible, legacy federal documents in two subject areas, with cataloging and provision of expert subject-based reference support services…
+ The GALILEO Knowledge Repository: Advancing the Access and Management of Scholarly Digital ContenT
The Georgia Institute of Technology, in partnership with the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, the Medical College of Georgia, Georgia Southern University, Valdosta State University, Albany State University, North Georgia College and State University, and the College of Coastal Georgia, will build a statewide institutional repository (IR) called the GALILEO Knowledge Repository. The partners will also host a national symposium on statewide and consortial repositories, create instructional materials, conduct consortial IR training, and offer consulting services. This project will advance scholarly communication by expanding the use of IRs by U.S. colleges and universities and by increasing the number of professionals with knowledge and skills in managing consortial IRs.
+ Information Literacy for Future Island Leaders
The University of Guam (UOG) library will create a comprehensive system of graduate student support through new bibliographic instruction (BI) classes, research services, and digital resources. The UOG library team will design services and instruction to support graduate programs and research using both traditional and digital resources…
+ Louisiana Legacy Library of Digital Moving Images Planning Project
Louisiana’s Old State Capitol Museum of Political History will partner with the Louisiana State Archives and Louisiana Public Broadcasting to preserve and catalogue the state’s film and video according to accepted preservation/archive standards for moving images and to expand public access to this invaluable resource. The project will plan for the preservation and access to endangered video recordings of the history and culture of the people of Louisiana over the past half-century, drawn from television and news broadcasts…
+ A Policy Based Archival Replication System for Libraries, Archives, and Museums using a Virtual Private LOCKSS
Working with the Odum Institute for Research (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), the Roper Center for Public Opinion (University of Connecticut), and the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (University of Michigan), Harvard will develop and distribute a production-ready open source tool for verified distributed replication of digital collection data, based on an existing prototype. The tool will allow any library, museum, or archive to audit replication of its content across an existing LOCKSS network and will allow groups of collaborating institutions to automatically and verifiably replicate each others’ content. Project partners will develop the prototype tool into a self-contained system that can be installed, used and maintained by institutional staff with limited technical expertise. The result will be a set of widely dissemination open source (OSI licensed) tools that can be used easily by libraries, museums, and archives
+ Rescuing and Archiving Social Science Data
Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world’s largest social science data archive, will work with members of the institutional repositories (IR) community to preserve and reuse legacy social science data. Over the last 50 years, improvement in data processing technology has resulted in increased amounts, formats, and complexities of research data on a variety of social, economic, and political subjects. Through its participation in the Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences (www.digitalpreservation.gov/partners/datapass/datapass.html), funded through the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program, ICPSR has discovered hundreds of social science data sets that are in danger of being lost forever and that could be reanalyzed with current techniques. The project will salvage many important legacy studies and their supporting data sets by converting them to new formats and will at the same time develop tools and workflows to improve the archiving of current data…
+ Oral History in the Digital Age
New technologies offer great potential for advancing the practice of oral history. However, they also introduce new questions and issues. Michigan State University, through the MATRIX Center and the Michigan State University Museum, will partner with the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center, the American Folklore Society, and the Oral History Association to recommend standards and best practices for digital oral history…
+ Supporting Early Literacy Learning: A Model Partnership between Children’s Museum and Public Libraries
The Minnesota Children’s Museum, in partnership with the Dakota County Library System, Hennepin County Library System, Saint Paul Public Library System, and other partners in the region, will develop and test an innovative early literacy program. Project partners will work closely with nationally recognized experts in early literacy and with local teachers and educational system administrators to ensure that the program is relevant and useful for those communities. The project will explore new ways that libraries and museums can bring their unique expertise together for new collaborations.
+ The St. Louis Freedom Suits Legal Encoding Project”
The Washington University Libraries, in partnership with the Missouri History Museum and other contributors within and outside Washington University, will digitize, transcribe, and encode the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project and supplementary materials…
+ The Next Generation Sheet Music Consortium
The University of California and its partner, Indiana University, will develop tools and services to meet the needs of both data providers (libraries, museums, historical societies, and other curators of sheet music collections) and users of sheet music (musicologists, performers, cultural and art historians, etc.) as identified from a needs analysis that was funded by a 2007 planning grant from the IMLS National Leadership Grant program. Tools and services developed in the project will enable institutions with limited technical knowledge to participate in the metadata aggregation service of the Sheet Music Consortium (http://digital.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic) and will provide users with a richer set of services, including the ability to contribute structured metadata to the collection, write annotations, and link to related materials of interest across consortium collections.
+ Bringing Oral Histories to Life – Unlocking the Power of the Spoken Word
The National World War II Museum will partner with National History Day to design and implement a methodology to enable video oral histories to be accessed and explored in innovative ways. Content will be made available to a wider audience, which will have the ability to participate in describing and referencing oral histories in a manner not currently possible. This project will develop methods of digitizing, indexing, and segmenting oral histories that can be used by other institutions to perform the same activities with their own holdings.
+ Refining a Digital Production Workflow in Public Television to Aggregate Video Assets for Educational Use
Educational Broadcasting Corporation (EBC) is taking the next step toward refining the digital workflow for its television productions. Creating a set of Media Asset Management (MAM)-based tools will allow multiple groups of users to package digital video content easily for distribution over multiple nonbroadcast channels. EBC’s ongoing preliminary efforts to create a fully digital workflow put the organization in a position to take the logical next steps toward integrating a number of related, but often uncoordinated, trends in digital preservation and archiving across the public media landscape. Digital audiovisual material is often harder to store, access, and preserve than analogue video tape and film…
+ Policy-Driven Repository Interoperability (PoDRI)
The University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill and the DuraSpace organization (formerly DSpace and the Fedora Commons) are partnering on the Policy-Driven Repository Interoperability (PoDRI) project. The principal focus of PoDRI is to investigate the feasibility of interoperability mechanisms between repositories at the policy level. There is a growing trend toward cross-repository integration, driven by the need for scalable, open, and distributed environments, in which content can be leveraged in a variety of storage spaces…
+ Classification of Government Websites in the End-of-Term Archive: Extending Depository Libraries’ Collection Development Practices
As the Web becomes the dissemination tool of choice for many information producers, many libraries will be collecting materials from this important yet unpreserved information source. Librarians need the capability to identify and select materials in accordance with their established collection development policies, and they also need common metrics to characterize these resources. Organizing the content in Web archives using established schemes is a promising solution to enable the extension of collection development practices to this new class of materials. The development of common metrics will also enable librarians to communicate the scope and value of these materials in the context of their current collections and collecting priorities. In this project, the University of North Texas is partnering with the Internet Archive to investigate these two needs in the area of government information…
+ Creating Collaborative Catalogs: Using Digital Technologies to Expand Museum
This three-year project [UCLA] will develop an innovative open-source, online collaborative catalog system and set of best practices that will dynamically expand the cultural and historical knowledge of Native American objects held in museum collections.
Publishing TEI Documents for Small Liberal Arts Colleges: Planning a Service, Building a Community
[Wheaton College] The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has become the main vehicle for transcribing and encoding primary source and archival texts. TEI is the ideal standard for preserving archival documents, representing them digitally for teaching, learning, and research, as well as making them available to scholars. The long-term goal of this planning project is to identify and develop an implementation plan to allow scholars and archivists from a wide array of liberal arts schools to store and display their TEI-enhanced digitized texts…
Source: Institute of Museum and Library Services
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