University of Rochester: Seward Family Digital Archive Project Tops $1 Million in Grant Money

From the U. of Rochester:

The Seward Family Digital Archive, a digital-humanities project that fuses object-based learning and community-engaged teaching, has received more than $1 million in external grant funding to date. The latest grant comes from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation for $289,100 to be paid out over two years.
The project, a collaboration between the University’s Department of History, the River Campus Libraries’ department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, and the Digital Scholarship Lab, brings together students in the humanities and computer science, residents of retirement communities, and retired volunteers from the greater Rochester area to help transcribe the thousands of Seward family letters, all written in Victorian-era cursive handwriting.

“Citizen archivists” is how Thomas Slaughter, the project’s principal investigator and the University’s Arthur R. Miller Professor of History, describes his team of students and retirees who transcribe, annotate, and tag personal letters of President Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William H. Seward, his wife, Frances Miller Seward, their immediate and extended family members, and friends from about 1820 to 1873.
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“The generous new grant from the Gardiner Foundation will enable students to train and support additional volunteers beyond the 20 now working with us, to enhance this community-engaged collaboration, and to increase the productivity of the project while maintaining the high standards for documentary editing set by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, which supports the volunteer arm of the project through December 2018,” says Slaughter.

Read the Complete Article
Direct to Seward Family Archives Website
Learn More: “My Dear Henry…” Generations Join Forces to Bring a Digital Archive of Victorian-Era Letters to Life
See Also: Seward Family Papers Project Earns National Archives Grant (June 2016)

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Digital Collections, Digital Preservation, Funding, Journal Articles, News, Preservation, Productivity