The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), in cooperation with Heritage Preservation, is presenting WebWise Reprise, two online events based on the IMLS WebWise 2012 conference. The first event, on June 14 at 2:00 pm EDT, will be “Sharing Public History Work: Crowdsourcing Data.” The second event, on June 28 at 2:00 pm EDT, will be “Oral History in the Digital Age.”

WebWise Reprise will be hosted in the Virtual Meeting Room of the Connecting to Collections Online Community. This Online Community is part of Connecting to Collections, a multi-faceted national initiative of the Institute of Museum and Library Services to aid museums and libraries in their care of collections. The Online Community draws on many resources that were developed for the initiative, including the Connecting to Collections Bookshelf and the Raising the Bar Workshops and Webinars.

Each 90 minute webinar will be moderated by Heritage Preservation Vice President Kristen Laise.  The webinars will begin with a 20 minute video presentation from WebWise 2012.  Participants will watch along with some of the presenters from each panel.  After the viewing, the presenters will offer additional insights and answer participant’s questions live.

WebWise Reprise is free of charge, and no pre-registration is required.  To participate simply go to the Connecting to Collections Online Community’s Virtual Meeting Room at the time of the webinar.  You need not be a member, just enter your name and location, and join the conversation.

Sharing Public History Work: Crowdsourcing Data
Thursday, June 14, 2012, 2 p.m.-3:30 p.m. EDT Public historians and librarians have long relied on their local communities for volunteers to assist paid staff as docents and interpreters, and as collections and reference assistants. More recently, a variety of collaborative online tools have it made possible for volunteers from a larger pool to assist museums and libraries to share in content work through crowdsourcing. We will watch the WebWise presentation of Ben Brumfield, Software Engineer at FromThePage Open-Source Transcription Software. In it, Ben discusses valuable lessons learned from crowdsourcing indexing of small collections. He will be joined by Sharon Leon, Director of Public Projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University to answer your questions.

Oral History in the Digital Age
Thursday, June 28, 2012, 2 p.m.-3:30 p.m. EDT The sound of voices from the past can bring history to life in a powerful way for the 21st-century learner. In this Webinar, we will watch the WebWise presentation of Dean Rehberger, Director of MATRIX: the Center for Humane Art, Letters, and Social Science Online at Michigan State University and learn about MATRIX’s newest Web site Oral History in the Digital Age project (http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu). Dean will provide a tour of the site which includes best practices on issues about collecting, curating, and disseminating oral histories and narratives using current technology. He will be joined by Doug Boyd, director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries to answer your questions about oral histories and how their projects might assist you in your work.

The National Museum of American History announced Tuesday, the appointment of John Gray as the Elizabeth MacMillan Director.  Gray was the founding president of the Autry National Center of the American West, which consolidated the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles with Colorado’s Women of the West Museum and the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles.  He retired from his position in 2010.

Prior to his involvement with the Autry National Center, Gray spent 25 years in commercial banking.  He has a bachelor’s degree from C.W. Post College at Long Island University and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Colorado. He is currently enrolled in the master’s program in Eastern classics from Saint John’s College in Santa Fe.

The NMAH press release is available by clicking here.

The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and its cultural partners- the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services are proud to recognize 50 exceptional programs across the country for their work in presenting rich arts and humanities learning opportunities to young people. From small towns to big cities, the 2012 National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award Finalists reflect the diversity of disciplines and settings of these wonderful programs that are taking place from coast to coast.

Program finalists in Mid-Atlantic region (full list here):

BookUp National
Book Foundation, Inc.
New York, NY

The Great Debaters!
Bronx School for Law, Government, Justice – NYC Department of Education
Bronx, NY

Ifetayo Youth Ensemble
Ifetayo Cultural Arts Academy
Brooklyn, NY

The Jewish Museum of Maryland is saying goodbye to executive director Avi Decter after more than thirteen years.  Decter arrived in Baltimore in 1982 to join Bob Weinberg in planning the JMM’s facility and future public and educational programs.  He returned in 1998 to in his words, “‘mind the shop’ for a few months.”  Decter “fell in love with the Museum” and a few months turned into thirteen years.

You can read Avi Decter’s farewell letter in this month’s News From The Jewish Museum of Maryland.

The Museum has appointed Marvin Pinkert as its incoming executive director.  Prior to this appointment, Pinkert served as the Director of the National Archives Experience in Washington D.C.

Sure, it’s wonderful to be able to view historical photographs or manuscript collections or even published volumes online. But it can take a lot of resources to get those materials on the web. From the imaging technology to the staff time (and expertise) to the server space for the digital files, posting significant amounts of archival materials online can be quite expensive.

So I was intrigued to learn about Project Gado, an open-source digitization robot – yes, robot – that is helping to scan the collection of 1.5 million historical photographs at the Baltimore Afro-American Newspaper.

Originally developed at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Africana Studies, Project Gado is now continuing its efforts to create a tool that will help small repositories digitize archival materials. (The project seems aimed at photographs in particular, but I think other types of non-fragile loose pages could be excellent candidates for robot scanning.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

A demonstration of Gado 2 in action.
Video courtesy of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Africana Studies.

The Baltimore Sun recently published an article about how the Afro-American Newspapers are using the device. You can also browse some of the images digitized to date here, and learn many more details about the project in this video presentation from a recent computing conference, PyCon 2012.

Of course, having an open-source digitization robot does not equal free digitization.

Project manager Tom Smith reported at the PyCon conference in March that the second generation robot, known as Gado 2, has scanned 11,000 images at about half the cost of normal digitization. He hopes that adding an additional machine might do even better. Apparently, the operator and the robot do about twice the work of one person; maybe an operator and two robots could do the work of 3 people, and so on. The project recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign to help pay for the staffperson who oversees and supplements the robot’s work at the newspaper. The project also offered supporters of that campaign a kit to build their own Gado 2 robots for about $500.

You may not want to trust Gado 2 with fragile or priceless archival materials, and it’s clearly not intended to work with bound volumes, like diaries or ledgers. But if you’re ready to tackle a major digitization effort with photographs or other sturdy sheets of paper, Gado 2 may be worth investigating further.

If a scanning robot is too far out for your institution, you may still be able to cut costs the old-fashioned way: with volunteers. The National Archives, for instance, is relying on hundreds of hours of volunteer labor each month as it digitizes its large collection of Civil War Widows’ Pension files, a unique resource for genealogists and historians.

Again, don’t mistake volunteer work for “free.” Institutions with robust volunteer programs dedicate significant staff resources to recruiting and managing their volunteers. But dedicated volunteers could help make a daunting process more manageable.

Below is a list of award winners at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians/National Council on Public History. Full OAH coverage can be found here.

Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award: Ira Berlin

Frederick Jackson Turner Award: David Sehat, Georgia State University.The Myth of American Religious Freedom

Merle Curti Award: Susan J. Pearson, Northwestern University. The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America

James A. Rawley Prize: Cindy Hamovitch, College of William & Mary. No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor

Richard W. Leopold Prize: William A. Dobak, U.S. Army Center of Military History (retired). Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1877

Avery O. Craven Award: Nicole Etcheson, Ball State University. A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community

Ellis W. Hawley: Darren Dochuk, Purdue University. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism

Liberty Legacy Foundation Award: Tomiko Brown-Nagin, University of Virginia. Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement

Lawrence W. Levine Award: Michael Willrich, Brandeis University. Pox: An American History

Darlene Clark Hine Award: Serena Mayeri, University of Pennsylvania Law School. Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution

Lerner-Scott Prize: Katherine Turk, University of Chicago. “Equality on Trial: Women and Work in the Age of Title VII”

Louis Pelzer Memorial Award: Hidetaka Hirota, Boston College. “The Moment of Transition: State Officials, the Federal Government, and the Formation of American Immigration Policy.” (Scheduled to appear in the March 2013 Journal of American History)

Binkley-Stephenson Award: Kevin J. Mumford, University of Iowa. “The Trouble with Gay Rights: Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia, 1969-1982

David Thelen Award: Nathalie Caron, Universite Paris-Est Creteil (sic) and Naomi Woulf, Universite Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 (sic) “The American Enlightenment: Continuity and Renewal”

Huggins-Quarles Award: Mekala S. Audain, Rutgers University–New Brunswick. “Southern Canaan: U.S. Fugitive Slaves in Mexico and the Expanding American Frontier, 1804-1865″

Tachau Teacher of the Year Award: Robert Good, Ladue Horton Watkins High School (MO).

Erik Barnouw Award:

Chad Freidrichs, Director and Assistant Professor, Digital Filmmaking Department, Stephens College. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: An Urban History

Linda Hoaglund, Director and Producer, ANPO: Art x War

OAH-JAAS Short-Term Residencies

Scott Laderman, University of Minnesota, Duluth: Ehime University

Danielle L. McGuire, Wayne State University: Yamaguchi University

Germany Residency Program: Bryant Simon, Temple University

OAH/Immigration and Ethnic History Society John Higham Travel Grants

Aaron Bryant, University of Maryland, College Park

Cynthia Greenlee-Donnell, Duke University

The National Endowment for the Humanities announced $17M in grants for 208 humanities projects.  The funding will support projects, fellowships for scholarly research, the creation of exhibits, digital tools and the preservation of humanities collections and reference resources.  Institutions and independent scholars from 42 states and the District of Columbia will receive NEH support.

A list of the Mid-Atlantic region’s 57 recipients after the jump, full list of recipients available here.

Delaware: (2) $115,350

Newark, University of Delaware (Summer Stipends), Project Director: James Brophy, Project Title: Democratic Publishers in Germany, 1770-1850. Outright: $6,000

Winterthur Museum (Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions), Project Director: David Roselle, Project Title: Advanced NEH Research Fellowships at Winterthur. Outright: $109,350.

District of Columbia: (3) $361,000

Folger Shakespeare Library (Humanities Collections and Reference Resources), Project Director: Stephen Enniss, Project Title: Cataloging, Digitizing, and Creating Access to 17th-Century British Book Illustrations. Outright: $280,000.

Folger Shakespeare Library (America’s HIstorical and Cultural Organizations Planning), Project Director, Stephen Enniss, Project Title: Shakespeare in His World –and Ours. Outright: $75,000.

Georgetown University (Summer Stipends), Project Director: Susan Terrio, Project Title: Unaccompanied, Undocumented Children in U.S. Custody. Outright: $6,000.

Maryland: (9) $780,293

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University (Summer Stipends), Project Director: Peter Achinstein, Project Title: Evidence and Method in Science, Outright: $6,000.

Baltimore: Walters Art Museum (Humanities Collections and Reference Resources), Project Director: William Noel, Project Title: Imagining the Hours: Creating a Digital Resource of Flemish Manuscripts. Outright: $265,000.

Baltimore: RIPM Consortium Ltd. (Humanities Collections and Reference Resources), Project Director: H. Robert Cohen, Project Director: Compilation of the Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale, 1900 to 1950 (RIPM), Outright: $265,000.

Baltimore: Unaffiliated Independent Scholar (Summer Stipends), Project Director: Marlene Trestman, Project Title: Fair Labor: The Life and Work of Bessie Margolin (1909-1996), Outright: $6,000.

Bethesda: Palestinian American Research Center (Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions), Project Director: Penelope Mitchell, Project Title: PARC Humanities Research Fellowship Program, Outright: $115,650.

College Park: University of Maryland (Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants), Project Director: Jennifer Guiliano, Project Title: Topic Modeling for Humanities Research.  Outright: $24,808.

University of Maryland, College Park  (Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants), Project Director: James Dickie, Project Title: ANGLES: A Web-based XML Editor, Outright: $49,929.

University of Maryland, College Park (Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants), Project Director: Travis Brown, Project Title: Active OCR: Tightening the Loop in Human Computer for OCR Correction, Outright: $41, 906.

University of Maryland, College Park (Summer Stipends), Project Director: Daryle Williams, Project Title:  A Spatial History of the Free Africans of the Slave Ship Cezar, 1838-1865, Outright: $6,000.

New Jersey: (3) $510,554

Pomona, Richard Stockton College (Summer Stipends), Project Director: Michelle McDonald, Project Title: The Free Produce Movement in Early America, Outright: $6,000.

Princeton, Princeton University (Humanities Collections and Reference Resources), Project Director: Clifford Wulfman, Project Title: The Blue Mountain Project: Digitizing Periodicals of the Avant-Garde, Outright: $227,054.

Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens (Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions), Project Director: Irene Romano,  Project Title: The NEH Fellowship Program at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Outright: $277,500.

New York: (28) $2,608,301

Albany: SUNY Research Foundation, Fredonia (Summer Stipends), Project Director: Emily VanDette Project Title: The Sibling Romance: Crisis and Affiliation in American Fiction, 1835-1900, Outright: $6,000.

Amherst: SUNY Research Foundation, Buffalo (Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants), Project Director: Neil Coffee, Project Title: Tesserae: A Search Engine for Allusion, Outright: $49,835

Annandale-on-Hudson: Bard College (Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants), Project Director: Aaron Glass, Project Title: The Distributed Text: An Annotated Digital Edition of Franz Boas’ Pioneering Ethnography,  Outright: $50,000.

Bard College (Summer Stipends), Project Director: Laurie Dahlberg, Project Title: Photography and the Transformation of a Gentleman’s Art, 1839-1900, Outright: $6,000.

Bronx: CUNY Research Foundation, Lehman College (Summer Stipends),  Project Director, Amanda Wunder, Project Title: The Spanish Style: The Politics of Extreme Fashion in an Age of Empire, 1492-1700. Outright: $6,000.

Brookville: Long Island University (Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants), Project Director: Deborah Mutnick, Project Title: The Pathways to Freedom Digital Narrative Project, Outright: $25,000.

Buffalo: Western New York Public Broadcasting Association (America’s Media Makers Production), Project Director: John Grant,  Project Title: Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America, Outright: $500,000

Hamilton: Colgate University (Summer Stipends), Project Director: Ulrich Meyer,  Project Title: Metaphysics in Motion: An Essay on Mechanics, Outright: $6,000.

Houghton: Houghton College [Summer Stipends], Project Director: Peter Meilaender,  Project Title: Patriotism in the Thought of Swiss Novelist Jeremias Gotthelf (1797-1854), Outright: $6,000.

Houghton College [Summer Stipends], Project Director: Benjamin Lipscomb, Project Title: The Oxford School: A Philosophical Group Biography of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch, Outright: $6,000.

Loudonville: Siena College [Summer Stipends], Project Director: Scott Taylor, Project Title: Stimulants and Trade in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800, Outright: $6,000.

New York: New York University  [Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grants] Project Director: Martha Rust, Project Title: NEH Enduring Questions Course on “What is Memory?” Outright: $25,000.

New York City Municipal Archives  [Humanities Collections and Reference Resources] Project Director: Leonora Gidlund Project Title: New York District Attorney Case Files, 1916-1925, Preservation and Indexing Project, Outright: $81,000.

API Arts and Outreach, Inc. [America's Media Makers Production] Project Director: Daniel Anker Project Title: The Greatest Jubilee: American Music and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Outright: $550,000 .

New School [Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants] Project Director: Peter Asaro Project Title: Digital Video Navigation and Archival Content Management Tools for Non-linear Oral History Narratives, Outright: $49,986.

New York Public Library [Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants] Project Director: Matthew Knutzen Project Title: NYC Chronology of Place, a Linked Open Data Gazetteer, Outright: $50,000.

Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. [America's Historical & Cultural Organizations Implementation] Project Director: Max Rudin Project Title: Civil War 150: Exploring the War and its Meaning Through the Words of Those Who Lived It, Outright: $500,000.

New York Public Library [Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions] Project Director: Khalil Muhammad Project Title: Scholars-in-Residence Program, Outright: $251,400 .

CUNY Research Foundation, Bernard Baruch College [Summer Stipends] Project Director: Alison Griffiths Project Title: Cinema, Prisons, and the Making of Modern America, Outright: $6,000.

CUNY Research Foundation, Hunter College [Summer Stipends] Project Director: John Wallach Project Title: Democracy and Virtue: Sisyphean Projects in History and Political Theory, Outright: $6,000.

CUNY Research Foundation, John Jay College [Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grants] Project Director: Jonathan Jacobs Project Title: NEH Enduring Questions Course on “Is Virtue Its Own Reward?” Outright: $24,991.

Poughkeepsie: Unaffiliated Independent Scholar [Summer Stipends] Project Director: Sophie Marinez Project Title: Women, Castles, and Power in Early Modern France: The Case of the Duchess of Montpensier (1627-1693), Outright: $6,000.

Rochester: Rochester Institute of Technology [Summer Stipends] Project Director: Christine Keiner Project Title: Environmental Diplomacy, Atomic Earthmoving, and Interoceanic Ecology in the Re-Making of the Panama Canal, Outright: $6,000.

Nazareth College of Rochester [Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grants] Project Director: Scott Campbell Project Title: NEH Enduring Questions Course on “What Is the Value of a Liberal Arts Education?”  Outright: $24,380.

Staten Island: CUNY Research Foundation, College of Staten Island [Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants] Project Director: Christina Tortora Project Title: A prototype of a syntactically annotated corpus of Appalachian English, Outright: $44,169.

Stony Brook: Long Island Museum of American Art, History, and Carriages [America's Historical & Cultural Organizations Implementation] Project Director: William Ayres Project Title: Installation and Interpretation of the Carriage Museum’s Streets of New York and Carriages for Sport and Pleasure, Outright: $286,014.

Syracuse: Syracuse University [Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grants] Project Director: William Robert Project Title: NEH Enduring Questions Course on “What Is Belief?” Outright: $24,526.

Troy: Russell Sage College [Summer Stipends] Project Director: Patricia Acerbi Project Title: Citizenship and Street Vendors’ Associations in Post-Abolition Rio de Janeiro, 1889-1930, Outright: $6,000 .

Pennsylvania: (12) $877, 387

Bethlehem: Lehigh University [Summer Stipends] Project Director: Jenna Lay Project Title: Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Book Culture, Outright: $6,000.

Carlisle: Dickinson College [Summer Stipends] Project Director: Alyssa DeBlasio Project Title: Russian Philosophical Thought in the 21st Century, Outright: $6,000.

Gettysburg: Gettysburg College [Summer Stipends] Project Director: Timothy Shannon Project Title: Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain, Outright: $6,000.

Lancaster: Franklin and Marshall College [Summer Stipends] Project Director: Amelia Rauser Project Title: Living Statues: Neoclassical Culture and Fashionable Dress in London, Paris, and Naples in the 1790s, Outright: $6,000.

Philadelphia: Temple University [Summer Stipends] Project Director: Steve Newman Project Title: Accounting for Scots Songs in Robert Burns: Narratives of Value from the Scottish Enlightenment to the 21st-century Academy, Outright: $6,000.

Temple University [Summer Stipends] Project Director: Lila Berman Project Title: An Urban History of Jews in Detroit after World War II, Outright: $6,000.

National Constitution Center [America's Historical & Cultural Organizations Implementation] Project Director: Stephanie Reyer Project Title: Prohibition, Outright: $400,000.

American Research Institute in Turkey [Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions] Project Director: A. Kevin Reinhart Project Title: Advanced Fellowships for Research in the Humanities at ARIT Centers in Turkey, Outright: $175,500.

University of Pennsylvania [Humanities Collections and Reference Resources] Project Director: Grant Frame Project Title: Preserving and Providing Access to the Official Inscriptions of the Kings of Assyria, 744 to 669 B.C., Outright: $160,000.

Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Film-makers, Inc. [America's Media Makers Development] Project Director: JulieHera DeStefano Project Title: Journey to Normal: Women of War Come Home, Outright: $75,000.

Unaffiliated Independent Scholar [Summer Stipends] Project Director: Atria Larson Project Title: Medieval Theologian Master Gratian and the Development of Penitential Thought and Law, c.1120-1215, Outright: $6,000.

St. Davids: Eastern University [Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grants] Project Director: Steven Mc Guire Project Title: NEH Enduring Questions Course on “What Is a Person?” Outright: $24,887.

Grants were awarded in the following categories:

 America’s Historical and Cultural Organizations: Planning and Implementation Grants support projects that create new ways to excite, inform, and stir thoughtful reflection upon culture, identity, and history in creative and new ways.

America’s Media Makers: Development Grants enable media producers to collaborate with scholars to develop humanities content and to prepare programs for production.

America’s Media Makers: Production Grants support the preparation of a media program for distribution.

Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants encourage innovations in the digital humanities by supporting the planning stages of projects.

Enduring Questions Grants allow faculty members to develop a new undergraduate course that grapples with a fundamental question addressed by the humanities.

Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions provide scholars with research time and success to resources that might not be available at their home institutions.

Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grants allow institutions to preserve and provide access to collections essential to scholarship, education, and public programming in the humanities.

NEH On the Road Grants help small sites defray the cost of hosting an NEH traveling exhibition.

Summer Stipends support full-time work by a scholar on a humanities project for a period of two months.

Heritage Preservation’s Emergency Response and Salvage Wheel is now available free of charge on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad as the ”ERS: Emergency Response and Salvage” app. Long known as the authoritative resource for salvaging artifacts after a disaster, the Wheel has been used by museums, libraries, and archives around the world. This new app makes the Wheel’s invaluable guidance accessible to anyone who is in need of practical advice for saving collections in the first 48 hours after disaster strikes.

Apple users can download this free app from the App Store. Simply search for “ERS: Emergency Response and Salvage.” To download, your device must run iOS 5.1 or later. Complete technical requirements are available on the ERS page at the App Store.

ERS provides the same reliable content found in the original Wheel. The app outlines critical stages of disaster response and provides practical salvage tips for nine types of collections, from photographs to natural history specimens. ERS can help users protect precious collections and significant records, access reliable information
instantly, and save damaged objects. The app was created in partnership with the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training.