Library hits jackpot of NEH grants

by Joe King

Forgive Arthur Young if he has been walking around with a grin on his face since April Fool's Day.

It is not a particularly good prank that has kept the dean of University Libraries smiling, but rather the fact that on that day the library received four grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities totaling $387,000. A separate NEH Senior Fellowship granted to William Baker pushed the total amount of grants from that agency to more than $400,000 for the semester.

"I think you would be hard pressed to find another library in the country that got four NEH grants in a semester, or even a year, let alone in a single day," Young said. "This is an achievement of note on a national scale."

The four grants came courtesy of two separate undertakings: The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau and the Division of Digitization.

Thoreau Keeps Rolling Along

The Thoreau project garnered $180,000 in NEH funding — $100,000 outright, and an additional $80,000 in matching funds. Those matching dollars are already in hand, thanks largely to a $50,000 grant from the National Trust for the Humanities, made possible through a donation to that agency from the Barkley Foundation, says Elizabeth Witherell, who has been editor-in-chief of the Thoreau Edition since 1980. The project moved to NIU in 1999.

Elizabeth Witherell

Witherell has devoted her scholarly life to creating the definitive edition of the complete works of Thoreau. Working from thousands of almost indecipherable hand-written pages left behind by the author, the project has produced 14 volumes, each with scholarly notes and introductions that document the editorial work and provide the historical background for the contents.

"We go back to the manuscripts and early publications in an effort to present a version of Thoreau's works that reflects his intention for them, that is true to what he set out to produce," said Witherell, who expects the project will ultimately require 30 volumes. "These grants will allow us to maintain the high rate of progress we've established here at NIU," Witherell said, explaining that the money will aid in the completion of five more volumes.

Dollars for Digitization

While Witherell's grants will allow her to continue her life's work, Drew VandeCreek's will enable him to move in new directions. Since 1998, VandeCreek has been director of the Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project and director of the Digitization Unit at Founder's Memorial Library. The Lincoln project, which has taken up much of his time, chronicles the years Lincoln spent living in Illinois (1830-1861), supplemented by resources from Illinois' early years of statehood (1818-1829). The goal of the World Wide Web site is to provide a record of Lincoln's career, but it also uses his experiences as a lens through which users might explore and analyze his social and political context. That project is about 95 percent complete.

Drew VandeCreek

VandeCreek's latest undertaking, thanks in no small part to a $167,000 grant from NEH, is to digitize the American Archives, an exhaustive compilation of Revolutionary War era pamphlets, newspapers and other materials.

The information was gathered by a Washington, D.C., printer who showed great foresight in preserving the materials, but had few skills as an indexer.

"These are not a rare resource, but the indexing makes little sense, and they are large, unwieldy books, which makes them very difficult to use. To find what you want you almost have to sit down and flip through the books," VandeCreek said.

Because of their haphazard nature, one of the greatest contributions of this project will not be just to make the material available on the World Wide Web, but to create a searchable database that allows researchers and scholars to easily find the source material they desire. Handling that end of the job will be Allan Kulikoff, a former NIU history professor who is now at the University of Georgia.

"Dr. Kulikoff originally approached me with the idea for this project," VandeCreek said. "Our goal is to make every entry searchable by a variety of criteria — year, state of origin, theme, etc."

VandeCreek's second NEH grant that day was $40,000 to facilitate the planning of a project devoted to chronicling, and placing in historical perspective, all of Mark Twain's writings.

"I really want to bring this author and this period to the public," VandeCreek said. "His works are a lens through which you can interpret the Gilded Age."

VandeCreek envisions the site as a stepping-off point for a variety of other activities such as cultural tourism or historical re-enactments and readings. The site could support such activities, he believes, by providing a collection of scholarly information, narratives, journals and other source material.

Achieving those goals will require assistance from several universities (Berkley and Tulane, among them) which have large Twain collections. The planning money will be used to work with those institutions and plan the project, said VandeCreek, who intends to apply for funding to implement the plan in about 18 months. He estimates the cost at about $1 million and anticipates having to find a variety of sources.

For now, however, he is pleased with the NEH grants he has received.

"It shows that they like our track record and have faith that we can do more. I hope this bodes well for the future," he said.

"The grants awarded to William Baker, Drew VandeCreek and Elizabeth Witherell constitute a record-breaking year for the University Libraries, and reaffirm our commitment to disseminate knowledge to the global learning community. I salute their creativity, scholarship, and spectacular success with national funding agencies," Young said.