National Historical Publications and Records Commission Awards Two Grants to CHNM

CHNM is pleased to announce two grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), during the May 2010 funding cycle.

First, NHPRC has awarded continued funding to the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800. This groundbreaking digital editorial project presents high resolution images of some 55,000 documents from the early War Department, which burned down in 1800. The collection has been carefully reconstructed through painstaking research in more than 200 repositories and more than 3,000 collections. This funding will allow the editorial team to dramatically improve the depth and quality of the metadata associated with the documents.

Second, NHPRC awarded its only grant in the “Strategies and Tools for Archives and Historical Publishing Projects” category to support the implementation, evaluation, and adaptation of CHNM’s crowdsourcing documentary transcription tool. Designed to allow members of the online public to contribute transcriptions to documentary edition projects, the tool’s initial development is being funded by an National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-up Grant. The NHPRC funding will provide for expanded user interface research and evaluation, as well as the creation of a set of connector scripts that will enable the tool to plug into common open source content management systems such as Omeka, Drupal, and WordPress.

NHPRC, a statutory body affiliated with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), supports a wide range of activities to preserve, publish, and encourage the use of documentary sources, created in every medium ranging from quill pen to computer, relating to the history of the United States.