With a $300,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, the University Library plans to develop a digital information community for American studies research.
The information community will serve as an online research source for students, scholars and interested Internet users. It will provide access to texts, images, videos, audio clips, maps and other resources of American literature and history.
The project "will give us a new model for promoting the scholarly exchange of ideas and encouraging interdisciplinary study," said Martha Blodgett, associate University librarian for information technology.
"Some work is already underway and the full-scale work will begin in the next few months," said Hoke Perkins, director of development for the University Library.
The online information community essentially will be a Web page that makes access to the library system's digital materials easier for users by putting all the different collections together in one archive with one search engine, Perkins said.
Drawing materials from the University Library collections, the project will include items from the Special Collections Library, the Tracy W. McGregor Library of American History and the Clifton Waller Barret Library of American Literature. It also will include resources from the Early American Fiction Archive, the Holsinger Studio Collection and other University holdings already online.
"We have great collections and many digital projects [already]," Perkins said. The online information community "will give us an umbrella to organize the material we have and to gather more."
As the library acquires new online resources, they also will be integrated into the project.
The library also will work closely with the University's American studies program and non-University institutions such as the Smithisonian Museum of Art on this project.
The library will provide technological, administrative and organizational infrastructure for the project, but will look to other organizations and individuals to determine the content of the information community.
"We hope to have a fully formed set of information ready and available [online] within the year," starting with a prototype Web site and adding information incrementally, she said.
The American studies information community project is funded as part of the Mellon Foundation's Open Archives Initiative, which allows libraries, archives and museums to electronically publish their collections and share them online.
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