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October 26, 2007 > News > Rice receives $1 million for digital archiving project

Rice receives $1 million for digital archiving project

By Diana Lee | Thresher staff

Rice recently received a National Leadership Grant for Building Digital Collections from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The IMLS is a government institution supporting libraries and museums through grants, research, and publications.

IMLS and Rice have contributed a total of $2 million for the development of digital resources that will help students search, browse, analyze and share electronic texts through the Our Americas Archive Partnership.

The archive consists of electronic texts about the social, economic and cultural histories of the Americas. Rice will make these documents open to the public for free. Additionally, the university will hire more researchers, translators and scanners for the OAAP, Director of Humanities Research Center Caroline Levander said.

“Creating a digital database would be crucial to the development of [hemispheric studies] because many of the researchers tend to be from the international community,” Levander said.

Levander said it was important to acquire this because the documents are rare and that the collection will be open to everyone in the near future.

“This project will allow students, including undergraduates, to gain a new view of studies on the Americas from what has traditionally been taught,” Executive Director of the Digital Library Initiative Geneva Henry said.

About 15 percent of the archive currently has both English and Spanish translations, and the vast majority of the remaining documents are either all in Spanish or all in English. In the future, Rice hopes to add French, Portuguese and other translations. Translation will be a continuing process but starts with funding from the three-year National Leadership Grant, Levander said.

The Early Americas Digital Archive at the Maryland Institute is a complementary archive to Rice’s OAAP. The Maryland Institute’s EADA concentrates on the time period between the 1500s and late 1700s while Rice’s project picks up from the late 1700s and extends to the era of the Panama Canal, Levander said.

Henry said it is important take advantage of resources to get the full sweep of information with a wider historical reach.

“Building infrastructures such as for OAAP allows researchers to span these individual digital collections in a seamless way,” Henry said.

In the completed project, researchers will be able to use geospatial interfaces similar to Google Maps. Henry said they will be able to point to a specific region of the Americas on a map and be able to pull out all related digital resources.

Documents are assigned official library descriptions, but researchers will be able to go in to tag additional relevant key terms that will facilitate the search process.

Lily Chun contributed to this article.

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