Internet Archive wants to partner with you to bring your ‘Hidden Collections’ into the public domain and become part of a global digital library!
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has launched Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Enabling New Scholarship through Increasing Access to Unique Materials.
This competition will award up to $4 Million to institutions, consortia and collaborative groups to digitize and provide access to collections of rare and ephemeral material with high scholarly value.
CLIR endeavors that “Digitizing Hidden Collections will enhance the emerging global digital research environment in ways that support new kinds of scholarship for the long term,ensuring that the full wealth of resources held by institutions of cultural memory becomes integrated with the open Web” (http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/about-the-program).The focus of these grants is to bring entire collections into the public domain,while promoting strategic partnerships and best practices for ensuring preservation and accessibility that is both stable and enduring.
Grants of between $50,000 and $250,000 for a single-institution project, or between $50,000 and $500,000 for a collaborative project may be sought for work beginning between January 1st and June 1st, 2016 and be completed by May 31st, 2019. (http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/applicants)
How Can the Internet Archive Digitization Team Help?
Let’s Cooperate on Your Grant Together – marry your great content with our end-to-end digitization skills to get your content up online safely and inexpensively.
We offer a Total Digitization Solution. Starting with non-destructive image capture, to storage and preservation, and ending with online discovery and access, our digitization solution saves you from having to worry about these details.
Translatable Metadata. Our existing relationship with Digital Public Library of America provides a possible route for your materials to join DPLA’s growing national collection.
Our Global Team Digitizes over 1000 eBooks and items every day. No need to reinvent the wheel. With our experience, training and engineering skills, we supply an end-to-end solution that allows our library partners and content contributors to focus on developing their collections, not on the back end details. For those new to digitization, we have the skills to help you avoid the common and costly mistakes of starting up a project.
We Don’t Just Digitize Books! Over the last decade, our format capabilities have expanded to: archival finds/ ephemera; microfilm and microfiche; audio; film and video; TV News; software and web. Let’s also apply together for grants to digitize other formats!
Many of Our Partnerships Have Been Consortial. We are proud to have driven projects for the Boston Library Consortium (BLA), LYRASIS, Consortium of Academic Libraries in Illinois (CARLI), Biodiversity Heritage Library and Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), among others. This means collections can be contributed by more than one institution, with funding issued centrally and distributed locally.
Far-flung Collections Come Together With Internet Archive. Our collections gather material from international contributors in one place; in the public domain. In some cases this has meant repatriating material digitally across great distances. Highlights include collections from the Medical Heritage Library, Biodiversity Library and Genealogy (in collaboration with FamilySearch).
Preparing Your Grant—What can Internet Archive Do?
Large and Small-Scale Digitization Capabilities. Take advantage of our experience working with collection sizes – ranging from hundreds of thousands of items to unique collections with only dozens of one-of-a-kind monographs.
We Can Tailor The Project to Your Needs. Having worked with over 1275 content providers during the last decade, our processes can be adjusted to meet your requirements.
Our Equipment and Software has been tested and Proven. Our non-destructive digitization process can be done inside your library by IA staff, or in one of our regional centers. The images can even be captured by you! We have a new Table Top Scribe system that can be purchased if your institution wishes to do the image capture in-house. It is portable, easy to use, and uploads material directly to archive.org. Our service package provides the technical back-end processes including preserving and ‘future-proofing’ your digital data 25 years, AND organizing your collections online so they can be discovered and used for scholarly research.
Our Digitization Specifications Have Become the De Facto Library Standard. Over 1,500 global libraries have used our services to digitally preserve, and importantly, make their material accessible. Our partners include 25 of the top 30 largest research and national libraries in North America.
Our Staff is located in 33 Locations, Including 26 Sites in North America. With this geographic footprint, your materials don’t have to travel far if you choose to have it digitized in one of our specialized digitization centers. This also provides opportunities to submit a grant proposal where the content might be located in 2 or 3 different libraries.
Let’s think big and make collections vital for scholarship and cultural heritage available to the world!
Want to know more? Attend the the upcoming webinars for applicants on February 4th and March 4th, 2015 from 2-3pm Eastern Time. (https://clir.adobeconnect.com/_a960001693/hiddencollections/)—looking forward to the resulting conversations, and we hope to see you there!
For more information about working with Internet Archive, contact Robert Miller.