Special Collections coordinates grant
Utah State University’s Special Collections and Archives, a division of the Merrill-Cazier Library, is the recipient of a Library Services and Technology Act grant that includes a number of collaborators throughout the state. The grant is federally funded and the State Library coordinates its distribution. LSTA grants are peer reviewed.
The project is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Library Services and Technology Act, administered by the Utah State Library.
The grant will support a project that will transfer what are called finding aids into a digital format. Finding aids are paper-based documents that provide background and context for primary resource collections, both printed and photographic. The project aims to create a single searchable Web database that combines finding aids from all Utah repositories.
The LSTA federal grant totals more than $101,000 and will be used for the Utah Manuscript Association Encoded Archival Description and Digital Linking Project. Total initial project costs will be $157,000.
Partnering with Special Collections and Archives are the Utah Division of State History, Utah State Archives, University of Utah Marriott Library, Weber State University Stewart Library and Brigham Young University Lee Library. Professional organization partners include the Utah Manuscript Association, Conference of Inter-Mountain Archivists and the Utah State Historical Records Advisory Board. Brad Cole, director of USU’s Special Collections and Archives, leads the project.
“A unified Web interface will provide universal access to the state’s most unique resources and will link to existing and future digital content in the Mountain West Digital Library,” said Brad Cole. “Not only will this database serve as another major component in Utah’s unified digital library efforts, it will constitute a building block for a future national database of finding aids.”
Cole said the LSTA grant provides funding for the pilot project, which is also supported with an additional $56,000 in matching funds from the project partners.
“We are committed to initially digitizing 900 finding aids,” Cole said. “We also want to create a system that can be used by smaller Utah cultural institutions, so that their information eventually can be included in the Mountain West Digital Library.”
The grant proposal listed a number of potential audiences for the digitized material, including educators in Utah and elsewhere teaching social science classes at the middle school, high school, college and university levels. Students from middle school to university studying historical topics are also potential users. Scholars searching for historical primary sources, family historians, Utah policy makers and other citizens will be users. Also, archivists, manuscript librarians, curators and public and academic librarians – in Utah and elsewhere – will be users.
“It will be great to provide access to all this valuable unpublished material and make it available to the public,” Cole said.
For information on the grant and project, contact Cole at Utah State University at 435- 797-8268 or by email at brad.cole@usu.edu.