Shining a Light on Hidden Collections and Catholic News Media

Abstract

Shining a Light on Hidden Collections and Catholic News Media Marian J. Barber38 As director of the Catholic Archives of Texas, a statewide repository of material from the early sixteenth century to the present, I am acutely aware of the many issues involved in carrying out our mission of collecting, preserving, and making available as appropriate thousands of records, photographs, books, and artifacts that document the Catholic experience in Texas. Collecting actually comes fairly easily, but preserving material and making it available to church offices, individual Catholics, academic researchers, genealogists, and others pose greater challenges. Digitization offers a promising option for meeting them. This discussion will focus on three ongoing efforts to use digitization to preserve fragile or deteriorating items and make those materials and others easily accessible to researchers with limited resources for visiting far-flung collections: programs implemented by the Council on Library and Information Resources, the University of North Texas’s Portal to Texas History, and the Catholic Research Resources Alliance. Council on Library and Information Resources The Council on Library and Information Resources, or CLIR, is an “independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions and communities of higher learning.” The Council often works with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to further the foundation’s goal of creating and disseminating new knowledge by serving as a re-granting agency. From 2008 to 2014, it administered the Mellon-funded Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives program that made 129 cataloging grants totaling over $27.5 million. Catholic institutions were not frequent recipients, but in 2009, Marquette University Libraries received a grant of $149,964 for [End Page 17] the Catholic Social Action Access Project, a collaboration with St. Catherine University and the Catholic University of America.39 In 2015–2016 Mellon funded a new project, “Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Enabling New Scholarship through Increasing Access to Unique Materials.” Again CLIR serves as the re-granting agency. For individual applicants, grants range from $50,000 to $250,000; for collaborations, $50,000 to $500,000. They distributed slightly less than $4 million in 2015 and slightly more than that amount in 2016. The goals include development of protocols for digitizing material and increasing access that can be replicated nationally and internationally. Free access is a very important element, though not obligatory. The new program places even stronger emphasis on collaboration than the cataloging project. In its first year, the 18 funded projects included a $499,086 grant to the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries, including Villanova University, for “Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis: Toward A Comprehensive Online Library of Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts” held in member institutions’ collections.40 Villanova is also a partner in one of the 17 projects funded in 2016, a $448,893 effort to document a publisher of nickel and dime novels. Other 2016 projects not directly involving Catholic institutions but of potential interest to researchers on Catholic subjects include programs on the American labor movement, executions in the United States from 1608-2002, Cuban-American relations, archeological finds in Honduras, and home movies and amateur films by women. Recipients of 2017 grants were to be announced in July of this year. CLIR notes that program funding must be renewed annually, but that they expect it to continue for several years.41 Also of interest to Catholic archivists should be CLIR’s “Strategies for Advancing Hidden Collections,” an effort built around a Mellon-funded series of six 90-minute recorded webinars and a resource library on “techniques and best practices for increasing the visibility, usability, and sustainability of collections in the gallery, library, archive, and museum community.” CLIR has also received funding from Mellon for “Recordings at Risk: Digital Reformatting of Audio/Film/Video,” offering $2.3 million over four rounds in 2017 and 2018. Two rounds remain; Catholic archives with rare or threatened recordings in any format should consider approaching CLIR about developing proposals.42 [End Page 18] Portal to Texas History The Portal to Texas History, a project of the University of North Texas Libraries, is one of many similar efforts undertaken in the United States by libraries...