Archiving the Americas

Archiving the Americas
Rice partnership receives National Leadership Grant

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News Staff

New online research tools that can help scholars around the world will be developed with a National Leadership Grant awarded to Rice.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) recently awarded Rice University, in partnership with the University of Maryland, the prestigious grant for the Our Americas Archive Project (OAAP). The project will help users search, browse, analyze and share content from various online collections.

JEFF FITLOW

Caroline Levander and Geneva Henry are shown in front of one of the rare documents to be added to the Our Americas Archive.

The three-year grant of nearly $1 million will supplement equivalent funds from the partnership among Rice’s Fondren Library, the Humanities Research Center (HRC) and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH).

The end result will be a free, comprehensive online archive with resources from distributed repositories that will allow users to more easily discover relevant source materials in English and other languages. OAAP software will be developed under an open source license.

Geographic visualization, new social tagging and tag cloud cluster models are some of the new interface techniques that the OAAP will develop to create innovative search pathways.

“By making hemispheric material available open-access worldwide, we are taking a first step in furthering scholarly dialogue and research across borders ” said Caroline Levander, HRC director. “We plan to develop innovative research tools that will help generate a collaborative, transnational research community.”

By conforming to best practices in library and information science and incorporating Web 2.0 technologies, OAAP will address challenges that have traditionally hindered researchers and scholars. Currently, electronic resources are housed in multiple online systems with inconsistent or domain-specific vocabularies, making it difficult to find and organize relevant sources, particularly non-English sources.

The OAAP’s new tools will first be tested on two online collections of materials in English and Spanish: Maryland’s Early Americas Digital Archive and a new digital archive of multilingual materials being developed at Rice. The two multilingual archives illustrate the complex politics and histories that characterize the American hemisphere and also provide unique opportunities to further digital research in the humanities. 

“Our goal is to develop new ways of doing research as well as new objects of study — to create a new, interactive community of scholarly inquiry,” said Geneva Henry, executive director of Rice’s Digital Library Initiative.

Henry, Levander and Neil Fraistat, MITH director, developed OAAP to support scholarly inquiry into the Americas from a hemispheric perspective. The project is uniquely suited for the hemispheric approach because its digital platform makes available materials that are dispersed in different geographic locations.

“Cultural institutions energize their communities not just by preserving culture, heritage and knowledge, but by supporting life-long learning and engagement,” said Anne-Imelda Radice, IMLS director. “National Leadership Grants harness the work of the best of these institutions. By promoting innovation and partnerships, they allow these institutions to create national models that address the challenges of the broader library and museum communities, and help strengthen their impact.”

National Leadership Grants help libraries and museums collaborate, build digital resources, and conduct research and demonstration projects. The selected projects are national models that will help foster individual achievement, community responsibility and life-long learning. This year 213 grant applications were received; 43 awards of more than $18 million were made.

The IMLS is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. Its mission is to grow and sustain a ”Nation of Learners” because life-long learning is essential to a democratic society and individual success. Through its grant making, convenings, research and publications, the institute empowers museums and libraries to provide leadership and services to enhance learning in families and communities, sustain cultural heritage, build 21st-century skills and increase civic participation. To learn more about the institute, visit: http://www.imls.gov.