NHPRC Digitizing Historical Records

The Commission seeks proposals that use cost-effective methods to digitize nationally-significant historical record collections and make the digital versions freely available on the Internet. Project must make use of existing holdings of historical repositories and be made up of entire collections or series. The materials should already be available to the public at the archives and described so that projects can re-use existing information to create metadata for the digitized collection. Applicants must have the permission of all relevant copyright holders, where possible.

To make these projects as widely useful as possible for archives, historical repositories, and researchers, the applications will be evaluated on:

1. The national significance of the collections or records series to be digitized;
2. An effective work flow that repurposes existing descriptive material, rather than create new metadata about the records;
3. Reasonable costs and standards for the project as well as sustainable preservation plans for the resulting digital records;
4. Well-designed plans that evaluate the use of the digitized materials and the effectiveness of the methods employed in digitizing and displaying the materials.

A grant normally is for 1 to 3 years and up to $150,000. The Commission expects to make up to 3 grants in this category, for a total of up to $300,000. The Commission provides no more than 50 percent of the costs of Digitizing Historical Records projects.

By Julie Linden and Anne Green at Yale. 

Digitization has the potential to transform scholarly use of data found in print statistical publications. While presenting images of statistical tables in a digital library environment may be desirable, the full potential of such material can be realized only if the resulting digital objects are easy to search and manipulate and are accompanied by sufficient metadata to support extraction of numbers from tables and comparison of numbers across tables.