Archiving the Americas
It’s an archive fit for a New World. Titled Our Americas Archive Project (OAAP), the initiative will help users search, browse, analyze and share content from various online collections pertaining to the history and development of the Western Hemisphere.
The project was made possible by an Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant awarded to Rice, in partnership with the University of Maryland. The three-year, nearly $1 million grant will supplement equivalent funds from the partnership among Rice’s Fondren Library, the Humanities Research Center (HRC) and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH).
The result will be a free, comprehensive online archive that draws from libraries, archives and other repositories and will allow users to more easily discover relevant source materials. OAAP software will be developed under an open source license.
“In making hemispheric material available open-access worldwide, we are taking a first step in furthering scholarly dialogue and research across borders,” said Caroline Levander, HRC director. “We plan to develop innovative research tools that will help generate a collaborative, transnational research community.”
The project is uniquely suited for the hemispheric approach because its digital platform makes available materials that are dispersed in different geographic locations. OAAP will address challenges that have traditionally hindered researchers and scholars, such as electronic resources that are housed in multiple online systems with inconsistent or domain-specific vocabularies, making it difficult to find and organize relevant information.
The OAAP’s new tools will be tested first on two online collections of materials in English and Spanish: MITH’s Early Americas Digital Archive and a new digital archive of multilingual materials being developed at Rice. The two multilingual archives illustrate the complex politics and histories that characterize the American hemisphere and also provide unique opportunities to further digital research in the humanities.
“Our goal,” said Geneva Henry, executive director of Rice’s Digital Library Initiative, “is to develop new ways of doing research as well as new objects of study — to create a new, interactive community of scholarly inquiry.”