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Electronic
Text Center will share $1.5 million gift with Monticello
Staff
Report
Two
recent grants will boost the Electronic
Text Center's efforts to offer important scholarly and historic
works online.
Jeffrey
C. Walker, a U.Va. graduate who sits on the Board of Trustees
of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Inc., has made a gift of $1.5
million to boost the level of information technology used at Monticello
and U.Va.'s E-text Center. The nonprofit foundation owns
and operates Monticello.
A
$250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation will enable
the University Library and the University of Trier, Germany, to
post on the Internet some 100 medieval German texts and several
related dictionaries that will help scholars trace the history
of German literature and language.
Walker's
gift of $500,00 will help the University meet a National Endowment
for the Humanities challenge grant, which will allow the University
Library to create a $1 million endowment for the E-text Center.
Income
from the Jeffrey C. Walker Fund for Technology in the Humanities
will provide quick-response digitizing for faculty and library
projects (including work on the papers of Thomas Jefferson and
other early American documents), train and support graduate students
and keep computer hardware and software up-to-date.
At
Monticello, $1 million of Walker's gift will endow the Walker
Fund for Technology, which will upgrade computer hardware and
software to make operations more efficient and open up new avenues
for scholarship and research.
Monticello
and U.Va. have a long history of cooperation, especially on programs
and projects relating to Jefferson. The International Center for
Jefferson Studies, located on the Kenwood estate adjacent to Monticello,
is co-sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and U.Va.,
and the two institutions jointly conduct a number of lectures,
classes, seminars, workshops and other activities each year.
The
grant for the E-text Center's international collaboration
with the University of Trier will support the creation of a Web
archive called "Middle High German Interlinked." The
two universities will digitize works from the period of Middle
High German, the predecessor of modern German. That period, from
about the 12th through the 14th centuries, includes noted chivalric
poetry, songs and epics.
"This
collaboration between U.Va. and the University of Trier will demonstrate
the possibilities and advantages of international cooperation
for the integration and Web delivery of complex literary and linguistic
electronic files," said David Seaman, director of the E-text
Center.
See
the center's Web site at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu
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