Marist Awarded over $230,000 in Grants to Bolster Digital Resources
The Marist College Department of Archives and Special Collections has been awarded over $230,000 through two grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
The NEH grant will enable the creation of an online digital humanities course, while the NHPRC grant will fund the digitization of Lowell Thomas's radio news show scripts, which includes about half a million pages. Dr. John Ansley, director of Archives and Special Collections at Marist, served as the lead writer of both proposals.
“Due to COVID-19, colleges and universities worldwide are turning to digital and online resources in greater ways,” Ansley said. “As we ponder how delivery of higher education will be handled during this global pandemic, there is no question that expanding digital content will be crucial to the future.”
Marist’s NEH grant is focused on bringing an already-established course in the School of Liberal Arts to an online format and ultimately sharing the course through Creative Commons. The course allows students to investigate how “digital technologies alter our understanding of history, literature, philosophy, religion, and culture,” and could be available as early as this fall.
The NEH accepted grant proposals this spring through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, and only 10% of the thousands of applicants ultimately received grants.
“Receiving this prestigious grant is a testament to Marist’s leadership in high quality online education and our commitment to the digital humanities,” Thomas Wermuth, vice president of Academic Affairs, said in the press release. “We are very proud to have been selected for this forward-thinking funding.”
Ansley’s team for reimagining the online course includes Dr. Desiree Dighton, assistant professor of English, Clare Flemming, archivist, and Brian Norberg, digital technologies librarian.
While Ansley and his team plan to prepare the online course for the fall, the NHPRC grant funds a project with a much greater timeline: an estimated 15 months. This undertaking entails the digitization of 500,000 pages of radio scripts written for Lowell Thomas’s radio news program, which ran from 1930 to 1976.
Once digitized, the scripts will be available and searchable on the Archives and Special Collections website. The grant totals $91,363.
Thomas was a renowned journalist, lecturer, author and broadcaster of the 20th century who completed his distinguished career in Dutchess County, New York.
“Receiving these grants will allow the College to continue to move forward on its mission of creating more robust digital resources for students and the wider public, including researchers,” Ansley said in the press release.
Source: Lowell Thomas Papers, Marist Archives and Special Collections