As the comic art bibliographer at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Randy Scott is responsible for growing and maintaining the largest library comic book collection in the world. With about 240,000 comics and books about comics, the collection is larger than that of the Library of Congress. If Scott could have his way, he would have a $5,000 monthly budget. However, like most publicly funded entities these days, he doesn’t quite have his dream budget. Scott has just more than $1,000 a month to work with.
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Published by rwatstein November 15th, 2008
in libraries, digital, collections and NYPL.
The New York Public Library quietly rolled out a new video series last month. Titled “Treasures,” it showcases 11 gems of the library’s vast collection of more than 50 million items. And since then it has joined Facebook, broadening an online reach that already included YouTube and iTunes pages to gain more of an audience — which, for one of the world’s largest public libraries, includes “everybody from preschool toddlers to the greatest writers in the world,” says president Paul LeClerc.
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Published by rwatstein November 9th, 2008
in education and collections.
Rare books and manuscripts, once restricted to scholars and graduate students in white gloves, are being incorporated into undergraduate courses at institutions like the University of Iowa, Smith College, the University of Washington, and Harvard. Last academic year, almost 200 classes and student tours visited the rare-books collection of the University of Pennsylvania. Students today often blindly grant authority to the online world. Curators want to reconnect them with original sources and teach them to question those sources.
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Published by rwatstein November 9th, 2008
in libraries and collections.
Records indicate that Berlin’s Central and Regional Library purchased “more than 40,000 volumes from the private libraries of evacuated Jews” through the City Pawn Office in the 1940s. And, this being Germany, the librarians maintained meticulous record books to keep track of their purchases—even though parts of the German capital were already in ruins. As always, preserving order was paramount. The librarians signed each volume and gave it an accession number, beginning with the letter J. No one knows how many stolen books are still on the shelves in German libraries today, although experts, like historian Görz Aly, estimate that there are at least one million.
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We present a “content integrity service” for long- lived digital documents, especially for objects stored in digital repositories. The goal of the service is to demonstrate that information in the repository is authentic and has not been unintentionally or maliciously altered, even after its bit representation in the repository has undergone one or more transformations. We describe our design for an efficient, secure service that achieves this, and our implementations of two prototypes of such a service that we developed, most recently for DSpace. Our solution relies on one-way hashing and digital time- stamping procedures. Our service applies not only to transformations to archival content such as format changes, but also to the introduction of new cryptographic primitives, such as the new one-way hash function family that will be chosen by NIST in the competition that was recently announced [10]. In the face of recent attacks on hash functions, this feature is absolutely necessary to the design of an integrity- preserving system that is meant to endure for decades.
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Published by rwatstein November 2nd, 2008
in libraries and collections.
English playwright Alan Bennett (The Madness of George III, The History Boys) has bequeathed his literary archive to the Bodleian library in Oxford. Bennett was originally prompted to hand over his archive by a former Bodleian chief librarian, David Vaizey, a friend since they met as undergraduates. He said that he saw the gift as a debt repaid. The Bennett archive, which includes original manuscripts and drafts for all his stage and television plays, is expected to be open to researchers by 2010.
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Published by rwatstein November 2nd, 2008
in libraries and collections.
Former astronaut Neil Armstrong has agreed to donate personal papers dating from the start of his flight career to his alma mater, Purdue University. Armstrong’s papers, boxes of which have already begun arriving at Purdue, will be an inspiration for students and invaluable for researchers, said Sammie Morris, assistant professor of library science and head of Purdue Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections. “For researchers, it’s going to be a boon. No one has been able to research these papers or study them,” Morris said.
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Published by rwatstein October 25th, 2008
in digital and collections.
One of the oldest and most valuable collections of handwritten medieval books in the world, housed in the magnificent baroque halls of the Abbey Library of St. Gall in Switzerland, is going online with the help of a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The collection includes material as varied as curses against book thieves, early love ballads, hearty drinking songs, and a hand-drawn ground plan for a medieval monastery, drafted around A.D. 820, the only such document of its kind.
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Published by rwatstein October 19th, 2008
in libraries, digital, collections and HahtiTrust.
In what may be the library community’s most ambitious digital collaboration so far, some two-dozen large research libraries this week announced the launch of a single, shared repository of digital collections, including scanned books, articles, special collections, and a range of “born digital” materials.
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Published by rwatstein October 19th, 2008
in libraries, digital, collections and HahtiTrust.
Library Journal Academic Newswire caught up with Wilkin to get some insight into what may be the library community’s most ambitious digital collaboration so far, the first in a series of Q&As with HathiTrust partners.
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Published by rwatstein October 19th, 2008
in libraries, collections, reading and teens.
While many of today’s teen readers easily navigate the teen collection and fully appreciate the depth and breadth of what is being published for them, those of us new to this world need a place to start. This recommends the best of the teen market. October’s offerings are linked by a common theme: Books That Go Bump in the Night.
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Published by rwatstein October 19th, 2008
in libraries and collections.
The British Library said it has bought a major archive of materials by poet Ted Hughes from the writer’s estate for 500,000 pounds (US$880,000). The library said the 224 boxes and folders of manuscripts, letters, journals and personal diaries would be an invaluable resource for literary researchers. The material ranges from recollections of fishing trips to correspondence with literary figures including poets Seamus Heaney, Kathleen Raine and Thom Gunn.
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Published by rwatstein October 19th, 2008
in museums and collections.
The Miami Art Museum will announce Friday that it is one of 50 museums in the country receiving gifts of 50 artworks from famed New York collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, who over a lifetime of scrimping and saving amassed a fortune in contemporary art. He was a postal clerk. She was a librarian. They lived on her salary and spent his on art. The gifts are part of a project overseen by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, titled The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States. The National Endowment for the Arts funded a book by the same name, expected to be released in November. The Vogels, who were never interested in profiting from their art and continue to live in the modest one-bedroom apartment where over the decades they hung and stored thousands of works (in closets, under the bed and in stacks everywhere), have given the National Gallery more than 800 pieces. They have promised another 268, not including the 2,500 works being divided among museums around the country.
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Published by rwatstein October 12th, 2008
in libraries and collections.
Nothing quite prepares you for the culture shock of Jay Walker’s library. You exit the austere parlor of his New England home and pass through a hallway into the bibliographic equivalent of a Disney ride. Stuffed with landmark tomes and eye-grabbing historical objects—on the walls, on tables, standing on the floor—the room occupies about 3,600 square feet on three mazelike levels. Is that a Sputnik? (Yes.) Hey, those books appear to be bound in rubies. (They are.) That edition of Chaucer … is it a Kelmscott? (Natch.) Gee, that chandelier looks like the one in the James Bond flick Die Another Day. (Because it is.) No matter where you turn in this ziggurat, another treasure beckons you—a 1665 Bills of Mortality chronicle of London (you can track plague fatalities by week), the instruction manual for the Saturn V rocket (which launched the Apollo 11 capsule to the moon), a framed napkin from 1943 on which Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined his plan to win World War II. In no time, your mind is stretched like hot taffy.
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Published by rwatstein October 5th, 2008
in politics and collections.
It takes a virtual media maelstrom to cover an election, so here’s a rundown of compelling politically themed A/V and other nonbook materials for your patrons. From Sarah Palin to Michael Moore, all the firebrands are represented. Vote media!
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The papers of legendary conductor, arranger and broadcaster André Kostelanetz have been donated to the Library of Congress by his estate. Kostelanetz died in 1980. The gift is a veritable treasure trove for students of 20th century music and broadcasting. The archive of Kostelanetz’ personal property, papers, clippings, letters, sound recordings, posters, and photographs spans some 73 crates. It documents in detail the career of one of America’s most remarkable men of music. The gift from Kostelanetz’ estate will complement the gift of scores and parts for many of his arrangements Kostelanetz made to the Library of Congress. His papers will join those of George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart, Frederick Loewe, Alan Jay Lerner, and Irving Berlin, among others in the Library’s collection of material belonging to eminent American musicians.
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Published by rwatstein September 21st, 2008
in libraries, collections and NYPL.
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has acquired the papers of Uta Hagen and Herbert Berghof, the library announced. The collection, which spans nearly 100 years of theater history, consists of thousands of pages of unpublished correspondence, diaries, scripts, manuscripts, photographs, clippings and other documents relating to the careers of Hagen and Berghof, who were married for nearly 40 years.
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Published by rwatstein September 21st, 2008
in museums, digital and collections.
The Smithsonian Institution will work to digitize its collections to make science, history and cultural artifacts accessible online and dramatically expand its outreach to schools, the museum complex’s new chief said recently. “I worry about museums becoming less relevant to society,” said Secretary G. Wayne Clough in his first interviews since taking the Smithsonian’s helm in July. Clough, 66, who was president of the Georgia Institute of Technology for 14 years, says he’s working to bring in video gaming experts and Web gurus to collaborate with curators on creative ways to present artifacts online and make them appealing to kids. “I think we need to take a major step,” Clough said in an earlier interview. “Can we work with outside entities to create a place, for example, where we might demonstrate cutting-edge technologies to use to reach out to school systems all over the country? I think we can do that.”
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Published by rwatstein September 14th, 2008
in libraries, collections and music.
Is this Beethoven’s last work for piano? Peter McCallum, associate professor in musicology at the University of Sydney, Australia, believes it is. The 32 bars of handwritten musical notation caught his eye when he was studying the composer’s last sketchbook in the Berlin State Library a couple of years ago. McCallum said he believed the piece was written in October 1826, a few months before Beethoven died in March 1827.
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Published by rwatstein September 14th, 2008
in digital, collections and databases.
From 10,000-year-old American Indian tools and weapons to 20th century African masks, more than 26,000 artifacts in the Wake Forest University Museum of Anthropology’s collections will be accessible online in a searchable database. Beginning Sept. 9, the public will be able to search the online database, www.wfu.edu/moa/database, and find a photograph and description of each object, including information about where it was collected. The collection includes Japanese kimonos, thousand-year-old Egyptian coins, 19th century Inuit dolls, pre-Columbian earthenware pots, and a vast array of other artifacts from cultures around the world.
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Published by rwatstein September 7th, 2008
in libraries, digital and collections.
A new study by Primary Research Group offers data on digitization projects in more than 100 museums and academic, public, and special libraries in several countries. More than 53% have teamed up with another department to work jointly on a project. The mean number of hours spent obtaining rights permissions or copyright clearance was 221. Nearly 49% of the organizations in the sample outsource some form of digitization, in whole or in part, to an outside party.
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Published by rwatstein September 7th, 2008
in digital and collections.
A 2008 National Leadership Demonstration Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services will enable the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh to digitally preserve more than 400,000 pages of historic materials related to the iron and steel industry. The $600,000 grant, awarded September 2 by IMLS Director Anne-Imelda M. Radice, will finance “The Legacy of Iron and Steel” project. With this grant, the library will demonstrate how it can use current technology to provide access to and excitement about its historic collections.
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The Library of Congress American Memory project and other digital initiatives provide free access through the Internet to the treasures of the Library’s collections that document America’s history, culture, and creativity. Across the country, the archives, cultural institutions, museums, and libraries of many states are collaborating to create similar projects. They provide unprecedented access to materials that document local and regional growth and development as well as a look at the cultures and traditions that have made individual states and communities unique. The following is a compilation of state and regional digital projects and collaborations identified thus far. For each project, the primary institution or institutions overseeing the project are noted. The list will expand as new projects become available.
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As libraries across the country try to reach out to people more at ease using search engines than hunting along bookshelves, some institutions are choosing to stock some unconventional material. The Greater Victoria Public Library has turned to video games. “Literacy has more than one meaning,” says Kirsten Andersen, who works at the Victoria library. When one 16-year-old boy wrote to the library to complain about its decision to add video games to its inventory of books and DVDs, “I told him what we tell people who challenge our material: That everyone has the right to choose what they want themselves, and we provide a variety of materials and everyone makes their own decisions.”
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Published by rwatstein August 31st, 2008
in libraries and collections.
The world’s largest monastery library, in the quaint Austrian town of Admont, has re-opened after four years of restoration work that have returned all its rococo splendor to this baroque jewel. Hidden in the Austrian Alps some 250 kilometres (155 miles) southwest of Vienna, Admont’s Benedictine monastery, which was founded in 1074 and spreads over 270 square kilometres (66,720 acres), has always striven for opulence. “During expansion work in the 18th century, the monastery wanted to compete with El Escorial,” the sumptuous monastery founded by King Philip II near Madrid in the 16th century, says Gudrun Pacher, spokeswoman for the Admont monastery.
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The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of material associated with Woodrow Wilson. This resource guide compiles links to digital materials related to Wilson such as manuscripts, broadsides, government documents, images, sheet music, and films that are available throughout the Library of Congress Web site. In addition, it provides links to external Web sites focusing on Wilson and a bibliography containing selected works for both a general audience and younger readers.
View the Woodrow Wilson site here
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Published by rwatstein August 31st, 2008
in digital and collections.
In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a cave, half-a-dozen specialists embarked this week on a historic undertaking: digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file—among the most sought-after and examined documents on earth—available to all on the internet. Scholars continually ask the Israel Antiquities Authority, the custodian of the scrolls, for access to them. The process will probably take one to two years—more before it is available online—and is being led by former Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Greg Bearman.
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Published by rwatstein July 26th, 2008
in libraries and collections.
The Reed Memorial Library in Ravenna, Ohio, has a collection of oddly shaped cake pans that it loans out to its members. Not only that, it also provides OPAC access to them. Sophie Brookover writes: “Obviously, I had to know more about this collection, so I emailed the library and was granted this interview with Esther Cross, head of children’s services, and the creator/maintainer of the cake pan collections.” They were featured last year in a nearby newspaper.
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Published by rwatstein July 26th, 2008
in libraries and collections.
It contains farm laborers’ Shakespeare-inspired expressions and the reasons why Pembrokeshire is called “Little England”. It took more than 40 years to compile and will form an epic record of Anglo-Welsh dialects for generations to come. Because now the new audio encyclopedia – a fascinating series of recorded interviews studying the English spoken by people in Wales – has been presented to the British Library’s vast sound archive in London. Featuring conversations with individuals across the spectrum of Welsh life, including cockle pickers, school children, farm hands and Tiger Bay residents, the collection was started in 1968 by dialect specialist David Parry. It was completed by fellow expert, Dr Robert Penhallurick of Swansea University.
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Published by rwatstein July 19th, 2008
in web sites and collections.
Small collection of annotated links to websites about ice cream, covering history, safety of homemade ice cream, photos, scientific aspects, and ice cream sundaes. Includes historical photos. From the Science Reference Section, Library of Congress.
Ice Cream: Selected Internet Resources website
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Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein announced today that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has become a founding partner in the World Digital Library (WDL).
NARA will contribute digital versions of important documents from its collections to the WDL, which will be launched for the international public in early 2009. These documents include the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, Civil War photographs, naturalization and immigration records of famous Americans, and photographs by Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine.
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Published by rwatstein July 19th, 2008
in libraries, digital and collections.
The airy WiFi-enabled atrium of the British Library befits a modern national library at the beginning of a millennium that is already being called the Information Age. But it is in the smaller, anonymous back-offices that history is being made. Almost 600 years after the advent of the printing press, work is under way on digitizing important books, newspapers and sound recordings as a first step to offering unprecedented access to hard-to-access materials. The British Library has digitization projects going on all fronts: 19th century newspapers, archive sound recordings, manuscripts from Central Asia (as part of the International Dunhuang Project) and UK theses for the Ethos e-thesis service. With its mass digitization of 19th century English literature nearing completion, the British Library faces some tough decisions about what to digitize next. Three of its projects are funded by JISC, which is supporting 16 digitization schemes in the UK to the tune of ВЈ10m. Sound, moving pictures, newspapers, census data, journals and parliamentary papers are all in the process of digitization.
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Published by rwatstein July 12th, 2008
in China, digital and collections.
The Duke University Libraries has launched a digital collection of about 5,000 photographs shot primarily in China between 1917 and 1932 by Sidney Gamble, grandson of Proctor and Gamble co-founder James Gamble.
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The searchable collection is online here
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The Library of Congress has awarded $300,000 to Middle Tennessee State University to provide access to some of America’s most important historical documents. The grant to MTSU’s Center for Historic Preservation provides an opportunity to work with “one of the world’s greatest resources,” said Dr. Carroll Van West, the center’s director. The grant will allow the center to focus on several aspects of American history that also are key in Tennessee’s past, said Stacey Graham, research professor at the center and project coordinator. Among them are the eras of Andrew Jackson, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Depression, World War II and the civil rights movement.Graham said folk life, art, music and architecture are other possible topics of study.
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Published by rwatstein July 5th, 2008
in libraries and collections.
Syracuse University has acquired a major collection of 78 r.p.m. records from the family of a Manhattan dealer, giving the university what it says is the second-largest collection of 78s in the United States, after the Library of Congress’s. Doubling the holdings of 78s at the university’s Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive, the collection of more than 200,000 records was donated by the family of Morton J. Savada, who ran the Records Revisited store on West 33rd Street in Manhattan for 29 years and died in February. Particularly strong in jazz and big bands, the Savada collection contains a wide swath of popular music from the first half of the 20th century, with country, blues, gospel, polka, folk, Broadway and Hawaiian music. It also has a strong selection of V-Disc records, which were produced for American military personnel overseas in the 1940s. Now in transit in 1,300 boxes, the collection will be cataloged once it reaches Syracuse, said Suzanne Thorin, the dean of libraries.
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Published by rwatstein June 1st, 2008
in search, books, collections and Microsoft.
Microsoft last week announced that it will pull the plug on its book and scholarly article scan plans, Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, and that both sites will be taken down. “We recognize that this decision comes as disappointing news to our partners, the publishing and academic communities, and Live Search users,” reads a Microsoft blog post from Satya Nadella, Microsoft senior VP search, portal and advertising. “We believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner.” Nadella said that books digitized under the programs would now be included in MSN search results.b
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The British Library’s ongoing projects to make thousands of books and other resources available digitally won’t slow down significantly, despite the ending last week of a partnership with Microsoft, a senior library official said recently. Microsoft formed a partnership with the library in November 2005 to fund the scanning of up to 100,000 out-of-copyright 19th century books, or around 20 million pages. The scanning work will continue for a while longer until the last 40,000 books are finished, said Neil Fitzgerald, digitization project manager.
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Published by rwatstein May 26th, 2008
in libraries and collections.
To feed the need to weed, NYPL senior librarian and self-described weeding “life coach” Lauren Lampasone provides a simple guide on what reference materials to toss and what to keep, as well as advice on mentally preparing to let go.
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Published by rwatstein May 26th, 2008
in books and collections.
Imagine owning a copy of Galileo’s 1632 book, Dialogo di Galileo Galilei (Galileo’s Dialogue), challenging the traditional thinking that the universe revolves around the earth. At the time, the book and its concepts were so controversial, that Galileo was convicted of heresy in 1633 and the book was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. Or perhaps a first-edition, autographed copy of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine is a more suitable choice for your own personal library? These books and more will be made available to the public, beginning this fall, through a unique partnership between Canada’s McMaster University Library and U.S.-based companies Kirtas Technologies, Inc. and Lulu.com.
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Published by rwatstein May 26th, 2008
in digital and collections.
On Tuesday, May 6, 2008, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein submitted a report, entitled The Founders Online, to the Committees on Appropriations of the U.S. Congress. This report is the National Archives response to concerns raised by the Committees that the complete papers of America’s Founding Fathers are not available online. The Founders Online is a plan for providing online access, within a reasonable timeframe, to researchers, students and the general public. The report is available electronically at the National Archives website. In announcing the completion of the report, Professor Weinstein said, “We feel this plan would provide scholars and the public access to the best available versions of the complete papers; it would also protect the longstanding interests of the publishers and host organizations which along with the Federal government have invested great resources in the past four decades. Most importantly, it would build a monument to the Founders of our nation in their own words.”
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In a deed of superheroic proportions, an anonymous donor has given the Library of Congress the original artwork by Steve Ditko for Marvel Comics’ “Amazing Fantasy #15″ — the comic book that introduced Spider-Man in August 1962. This unique set of drawings for 24 pages features the story of the origin of Spider-Man along with three other short stories — also written by Stan Lee and drawn by Steve Ditko — for the same issue: “The Bell-Ringer,” “Man in the Mummy Case” and “There Are Martians Among Us”
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In a dimly lit back room on the second level of the University of Michigan library’s book-shelving department, Courtney Mitchel helps a giant desktop machine digest a rare, centuries-old Bible. Mitchel is among hundreds of librarians from Minnesota to England making digital versions of the most fragile of the books to be included in Google Book Search. The manual scanning is much slower than Google’s normal process.
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If you think that your business is having a tough time coping with the data explosion, then spare a thought for the Library of Congress, which has to find some way of tackling a mind-blowing amount of information. ”The digital revolution is comparable to the one started by Gutenberg more 500 years ago,” said Laura Campbell, the archive’s associate librarian, referring to the first book printed with movable type. In its 208-year history, the library has collected more than 138 million items in 450 languages, ranging from manuscripts to maps and sound recordings, but the Internet era poses a whole new set of challenges. ”We estimate that in the current digital age, the amount of information produced every 15 minutes is equivalent to all the data and information now in the Library of Congress,” explained Campbell, during a keynote. “The library can no longer collect everything.”
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Published by rwatstein April 27th, 2008
in collections and Library of Congress.
Tatiana Fessenko (1915-1995) was a cataloger at the Library of Congress for several decades, retiring in the early 1980s. A native of Kiev with an educational background in Russian language and literature, Ms. Fessenko was particularly interested in the Library’s Yudin Collection, acquired in 1906. It was she who cataloged most of the 18th and early 19th century materials from the 80,000 volume Yudin Collection, in many cases doing extensive bibliographical and biographical detective work to discover the authors of pseudonymous and anonymous works, and the original titles of works originally published in French, German, or English.
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Published by rwatstein April 27th, 2008
in education and collections.
E-book technology firm ebrary has announced that it will provide librarians as well as students and faculty in library science and related programmes with complimentary access to its Library Center for one year in support of National Library Week. Subsidised by ebrary, the Library Center includes more than 85 full-text e-books.
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The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of material associated with John Adams. This resource guide compiles links to digital materials related to Adams such as manuscripts, letters, broadsides, government documents, and images that are available throughout the Library of Congress Web.
John Adams Resource Guide
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Tagcow is a newly launched photo tagging service that is generating a lot of buzz for the way it categorizes photos, allowing people to quickly find their favorite images of family members, pets, natural landmarks and more. Basically, it makes massive numbers of photos housed on Flickr or in a personal photo folder easily searchable by what appears in the photo.
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This virtual museum is for the new generation of librarians who may not be familiar with the tools and methods used before technology and the digitization of library catalogs stepped in. It is also for those experienced librarians who have been in the profession for many years; perhaps the museum will bring back a bit of nostalgia. This site provides a look inside the history of libraries and librarianship. Librarians have always worked hard to adapt to the constantly changing technology that is meant to make libraries more efficient. The changes vary from the methods used to catalog items to the tools used to catalog them. Within these pages can be seen the transition, innovation, and the differences from one method or tool to the next.
Virtual Museum of Cataloging & Acquisitions Artifacts web site
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Published by rwatstein March 29th, 2008
in libraries, digital and collections.
The Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC are to put all 75 editions of William Shakespeare’s plays from before 1641 online. The quartos are the earliest printed editions of the plays and are the closest to what Shakespeare actually wrote still in existence. The project is intended to give the public greater access to the plays and downloading of the quartos will begin next month.
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Published by rwatstein March 23rd, 2008
in archives and collections.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) $4.27 million to conduct “a national competition” to identify and catalog hidden special collections and archives. CLIR officials said they will issue a request for proposals by early June, with the first round of winners to be announced in fall 2008. CLIR expects to distribute about $4 million in the first cycle. The awards will go to institutions holding collections of “high scholarly value that are difficult or impossible to locate through finding aids.”
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