Archival Projects

For projects that ensure online public discovery and use of historical records collections.

FY 2024

University of Alabama

Tuscaloosa, AL 

$110,798 to support a project to enhance finding aid description and digitize an anticipated total of 40,230 records referring to Alabama’s coal and iron labor history, including the Brierfield Iron Works, Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, and the Shelby Iron Company. (RH-104728)

University of Georgia

Athens, GA

$137,080 to support the Finding Their Names project to digitize and enhance description and discovery of documents from approximately 80 collections related to enslavement in Georgia. The enhanced description will include a form of reparative description that will name enslaved individuals in item- and folder-level scope and content notes. (RH-104735)

Citizens Motorcar Company 

  dba America's Packard Museum

Dayton, OH

$51,030 to support the processing and digitizing of the Automobile Quarterly Collection (1962-2012), to enhance access through a finding aid for 1,143 cubic feet of production records, slides and negatives, and research files, and to digitize and provide online access to a sample of 1,500 photographs, documents, and drawings from this vintage motorcar publication.  (RH-104737)

Amistad Research Center

New Orleans, LA

$150,000 to support a project to arrange, describe, and provide long-term preservation, conservation, and access to approximately 140 linear feet of historical records on African American Freemasonry: the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge Free & Accepted Masons for the State of Louisiana (1857-2017).  (RH-104756)

San Diego Air and Space Museum

San Diego, CA

$150,000 to support a project to catalog, rehouse, digitize, and create a finding aid for the San Diego Aviation Company’s Rohr/Goodrich Collection. Founded in 1940, Rohr/Goodrich was a major contributor to aviation manufacturing. The museum will increase online discoverability of the 170,000 images. (RH-104767)

Museum of Chinese in America

New York, NY

$149,400 to support a project to digitize approximately 16,000 images from 443 rolls of 35-mm negatives taken in 1975 from the photography collection of Emile Bocian (1912-1990). In his capacity as a photojournalist for the now defunct China Post, Bocian documented New York’s Chinese American community throughout the 1970s and 1980s. (RH-104769)

University of Cincinnati

Cincinnati, OH

$109,349 to support a project to complete archival processing of the records of the Cincinnati Branch of the NAACP related to the 1974 Bronson v Cincinnati Board of Education desegregation case (215 linear feet), the city’s most significant case in the fight for school desegregation. The collection includes correspondence, court filings, background research on segregation in education, the conditions of the schools, curriculum, and information about how Cincinnati Public Schools addressed the decree. (RH-104772)

New York City Department of Records and Information Services

New York, NY

$148,093 to support a project to expand public discovery of 268 cubic feet of records created by the New York City Commission on Human Rights (1945-1976). The records include minutes, reports, speeches, correspondence, and planning files created to address systemic injustice. The department will digitize for online access 53 cubic feet of the earliest records. (RH-104776)

B&O Railroad Museum, Inc.

Baltimore, MD

$102,542 to support the second phase of a project to process an additional 25,000 records of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Relief Department. The first phase processed 15,000 records from the B&O Railroad’s efforts to respond to their employees before programs such as workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, private health insurance, and other such social insurance and security programs existed.  (RH-104778)

University of Nebraska at Omaha

Omaha, NE

$150,000 to support a collaboration with Great Plains Black History Museum to arrange and describe the museum’s archival collection, 115 cubic feet of material dating from 1870 to 2015 that documents the development of the Black community in Omaha, Nebraska, and more broadly in the Great Plains. (RH-104785)

Old Dartmouth Historical Society

  dba New Bedford Whaling Museum

New Bedford, MA

$147,972 to support a project digitizing approximately 348,000 pages from 1,200 whaling logbooks and journals, spanning from 1669 to 1977. The logbooks and journals detail not only  how many whales were taken and where, but also detail unique interactions with coastal and islander communities and Indigenous nations and tribal groups, historical weather data, and information about crew members. (RH-104805)

FY 2023

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

New York, NY

$150,000 to support a project to conserve, process, digitize and make available online 67 linear feet from the Jewish Labor and Political Archives: the International Ladies' Garment Workers’ Union Collection, Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Collection, and the Jewish Labor Committee Collection. (RH-103536)

Northeast Historic Film

Bucksport, ME

$102,801 to digitize, catalog, and provide access to 2,969 news stories and programs (about one million feet of audiovisual material) produced by WCVB-TV Boston from the years 1973 and 1974. (RH-103541)

University of Tennessee, Chattanooga

Chattanooga, TN

$144,049 to support a project to process and describe 125 linear feet of archival material amassed by Tommie F. Brown (1934- ), an accomplished civic leader, educator, researcher, and state legislator whose career is defined by historic firsts, including serving from 1992-2012 as the first Black woman to represent the 28th District in the Tennessee House of Representatives. (RH-103542)

University of Wisconsin

Madison, WI

$103,063 to support a project at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research to process approximately 237 cubic feet from four collections: the film critic and programmer Amos Vogel, the founding editors of Jump Cut, the feminist editor Elfrieda Abbe, and the Wisconsin Film Festival. (RH-103544)

Tacoma Public Library

Tacoma, WA

$126,823 to support a project to re-house, digitize, and make publicly available the photograph archive of the Tacoma News Tribune (established 1883), the state’s second-largest newspaper. The Library will also update the primary source sets and lesson plans for K-12 students to include digital surrogates from the Tacoma News Tribune photo morgue and create a public  exhibit. (RH-103549)

Tulane University

New Orleans, LA

$72,441 to support the Amistad Research Center’s project to provide access to 21 archival collections totaling 109 linear feet documenting Historically Black Colleges and Universities, public school integration, African American arts administration, cross cultural efforts between the U.S.  and Africa, the history of the NAACP, housing discrimination, and intergroup and race relations. (RH-103557) 

New York University

New York, NY

$142,766 to support the digitization of the Daily Worker and Daily World Negatives Collection (36 linear feet) that will produce nearly 185,000 newly accessible photographs drawn from the newspapers of the Communist Party, USA. The photo collections provide images of labor, immigration, race, class, and political culture, including historic and watershed events of the era and depict leading national figures of the 20th century. (RH-103562)

Cranbrook Educational Community

Bloomfield Hills, MI

$131,026 to support a project to digitize documents of Cranbrook’s Horizons-Upward Bound Program, one of the oldest and largest college access programs, serving low-income and first-generation high school students from Detroit area public schools by providing opportunities for academic and cultural enrichment in the pursuit of higher education, at no cost to the students. The project will include 35 minutes of motion picture film of HUB’s history. (RH-103566)

Atlanta Historical Society, Inc.

Atlanta, GA

$137,554 to support a project to rehouse, arrange, and create publicly accessible finding aids for archival collections that document populations and land use in and around Atlanta. The collections - the Atlanta Department of City Planning, Atlanta Urban Design Commission, and Atlanta Real Estate Board appraisals - are important to understanding the impacts of segregation and redlining on Black Atlantans. (RH-103567)

Arizona Corporation Commission

Phoenix, AZ

$132,355 to support a project to digitize and provide public access to docket information for evidentiary hearings on cases involving the regulation and oversight of regulated utilities, pipeline and railroad safety, and securities salespersons and investment management advisors. The Docket Control Office will digitize at least 899 rolls, approximately 5.6 million images, of the most frequently requested files. (RH-103571)

Nebraska State Historical Society

Omaha, NE

$148,492 to support History Nebraska’s project  to convert its existing collection descriptions by migrating approximately 1,400 government record and manuscript finding aids from non-EAD documents into ArchivesSpace; oversee the migration of the remaining 1,500 finding aids in the collection; and link the finding aids to born-digital and digitized assets to Preservica, which currently contains over 470,900 digital assets. (RH-103576)

La MaMa Experimental Theater Club

New York, NY

$118,320 to support a project to recover data lost in 2022: approximately 600 object records, 200 production records, and 150 work records from the first half of the 1990s. These records represent material such as posters, VHS, programs, flyers, press, photographs, and more. This project will re-digitize those records, as well as digitize 400 new object records, 100 new production records, and 100 new work records. (RH-103577)

University of Utah

Salt Lake City, UH

$130,834 to support a project to review, update, or create at least 400 collection finding aids related to women, create at least one LibGuide informing patrons of the existence of these archival collections and teaching them how to access the materials, and create at least one exhibition allowing university and community patrons to learn about women’s contributions to Utah and regional culture and history. (RH-103579)

Westchester County Historical Society

Elmsford, NY

$75,875 to support a project to digitize the McDonald Papers (1,100 annotated) handwritten transcriptions of 407 interviews with participants and eyewitnesses to the Revolutionary War recorded between 1844 and 1850. (RH-103590)

Drexel University

Philadelphia, PA

$149,938 to support a project to digitize the Local History Collection (formerly held by the Philadelphia History Museum as part of the Atwater Kent Collection) which contains an estimated 20,000 individual paper-based items from the late 17th through early 21st centuries, totaling 150 linear feet. The project will catalog 10,000 item-level entries to be searchable online via PhiladelphiaHistory.org, digitize 15,000 historical records; and create a new comprehensive descriptive online finding aid. (RH-103591)

West Virginia University

Morgantown, WV

$150,000 to support a project to process 40 feminist collections from the 1950s to the early part of the 21st century totaling 325 linear feet plus 45 GB of electronic records and digitize a minimum of 100 representative documents drawn from collections of playwrights, novelists, and historians; the Artemis Sisters Collective Collection; the Women’s Information Center; the university’s Council for Women’s Concerns and the Women and Gender Studies; and the papers of Linda Cooper, a leader for environmental justice who helped create the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge; and others. (RH-103587)

New America Foundation

Washington, DC

$149,571 to support a project in collaboration with the Alexandria Library in Virginia to shed light on an under-told story of a precursor event to the Civil Rights Movement: The Alexandria Library Sit-In of 1939. The project aims to digitize select portions of collections at the Alexandria Library’s Local History and Special Collections branch. New America will also integrate these digitized materials into an online storytelling exhibit and hold two workshops for educators and scholars. (RH-103598)

WQED Multimedia

Pittsburgh, PA

$150,000 to support a project to preserve, digitize, and make accessible approximately 870 hours of video from the television programs “Black Horizons,” “Horizons,” “OnQ,” as well as documentaries and other Black history programs. Once digitized and cataloged, this content will be contributed to the the American Archive of Public Broadcasting; preserved at the Library of Congress; and made freely available online through AAPB’s online database. (RH-103607)

Densho

Seattle, WA

$85,375 to support a project to Densho process, digitize, and make available the Loni Ding Oral History and Film Research Collection. Ding (1931-2010), a pioneering Chinese American documentary filmmaker, television producer, educator, and activist, dedicated her career to increasing awareness of the Asian American experience and promoting the use of filmmaking to address social justice and equity. The collection consists of 12 linear feet of photographs, documents, and ephemera and 41 linear feet of analog A/V materials related to her films. (RH-103608)

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society

San Francisco, CA

$122,725 to support “Lavender Godzilla,” a project to process and create online finding aids for seven collections (50.75 linear feet) related to LGBTQ Asian American/Pacific Islander people. Additionally, GLBTHS will digitize material from these collections and three additional, previously processed collections, and provide online access to 1,000 items from these ten collections. (RH-103610)

National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition

Minneapolis, MN

$124,311 to support a project to digitize 20,000 pages of records (1852-1945) related to at least nine Quaker-operated boarding schools from six states held in the collections at Swarthmore College and Haverford College. This group of records are from Quaker-operated boarding schools and Quaker organizations include enrollment papers, financial information, correspondence, administrative records, and photographs. (RH-103611)

FY 2022

Museum of New Mexico 

Santa Fe, NM

$149,921 to digitize and make available online 24 linear feet of manuscript material, describe 12 linear feet of photographic material, and digitize approximately 8,000 images from the collection of Edgar L. Hewett, educator and archeologist, whose work focused on Native American communities of the Southwest. (RH-103400)

University of Colorado

Boulder, CO

$149,430 to process 47 linear feet, digitize 7,216 pages, and provide online access to the finding aid and digital images from the collection of  Joe Ben Wheat, archaeologist, curator, teacher, and author known for his expertise on textiles of the Navajo and other tribes in Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. (RH-103411) 

Jewish Theological Seminary of America

New York, NY

$142,549 to process two collections of audiovisual recordings that document the Jewish experience and digitize 1,750 audiovisual recordings that fall into five categories: American politics, law, and ethics; interfaith relationships; arts and literature; discussions with Jewish leaders; and the life and work of theologian Abraham Heschel. (RH-103412) 

Illinois Supreme Court Historic Preservation Commission

Springfield, IL

$135,830 to digitize 46 cubic feet of Illinois Supreme Court case files (approximately 110,000 pages) dating from 1818 to 1865 and make the digital images available online. (RH-103418) 

Amistad Research Center

New Orleans, LA

$120,000 to process 112 linear feet of the records of Alternate ROOTS, a regional arts service organization, from 1975-2017. The project will create an online finding aid to the record, digitize and create metadata for all of the collection’s moving image and sound recordings, and digitize 10% of the photographs in the collection and make them available through the Louisiana Digital Library. A series of online webinars that support community-based archiving will be offered. (RH-103419)

Museum of Ventura County

Ventura, CA

$95,000 to process the Robert Martin and Associates Collection, which constitutes the institutional records of one of the county’s longest-serving civil engineering firms. The collection includes engineering and architectural drawings, maps, and the planning documents for residential, commercial, and government buildings from the 1920s to 2013. About 1,000 items will be digitized and workshops will be provided for local cultural heritage organizations. (RH-103424)

The American Jewish Historical Society

New York NY

$146,461 to arrange and describe the records of the Greater New York Conference for Soviet Jewry (215 linear feet) and digitize selected documents from the collection and make them available online. The project will also arrange an accretion to the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews collection and arrange and describe the personal papers of Ann Polunsky, an activist in the Soviet Jewry movement. (RH-103431)

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Blacksburg, VA

$149,842 to process 17 collections from the Archives of American Aerospace Exploration (506 cubic feet) that document the period 1885 to 2008, improve the online description available for seven additional collections, and create two physical exhibits and an accompanying digital exhibit. (RH-103436 )

California State University Dominguez Hills 

Dominguez Hills, CA

$149,900 to process, describe, and start to digitize approximately 150 linear feet of material from The Los Angeles Free Press and from Art Kunkin, its publisher. The Los Angeles Free Press is one of the first, and largest, of the underground newspapers of the 1960s. (RH-103442) 

Sila M. Calderon Foundation, Inc.

San Juan, PR

$22,790 to digitize approximately 128,000 pages produced and received by the Office of Governor Sila M. Calderon from January 2001 to January 2005. (RH-103443)

University of Southern Mississippi

Hattiesburg, MS

$135,828 to process 12 collections (totaling 288 cubic feet) related to children’s literature, women and people of color, and politics, and create 1,200 digital images and make them available online.  Collections include the papers of artists such as Tana Hoban, civil rights activist Sue Sojourner, and photojournalist Mary Ann Wells. (RH-103448) 

Columbia University

New York, NY 

$148,789 to acquire and upload state and local government records related to the coronavirus pandemic and upgrade the access tools for Documenting COVID-19, a publicly available online repository. (RH-103448)

Arizona Corporation Commission

Phoenix, AZ

$140,624 to digitize 3.5 million microfiche images of business filings for the period 1912-1980, index the digital records by business entity name, and upload the digital records to a repository system and enable online public access. (RH-103452)

Regional Plan Association, Inc

New York, NY

$65,470 to improve access to the records of the  Regional Plan Association from the 1960s through the 1980s. The project will digitize 70 cubic feet of documents and 20 bound publications that total approximately 150,000 pages, 20 maps, five cubic feet of 35mm slides and photographs, and 18 audiovisual tapes with a total runtime of approximately 400 minutes. (RH-103455)

B&O Railroad Museum

Baltimore, MD

$92,039 to process and describe 15,000 employee case files from the records of the B&O Railroad Relief Department that cover the period 1880 to 1963. (RH-103466)