Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Provides University Of Virginia With A Three-Year Grant To Support Digital Scholarship

January 6, 2000 -- The University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) has received a $1 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support scholarly research based on digital primary resources.

The institute will work in partnership with the University Library in a three-year project supporting scholarly use of digital images, texts, maps, models and other materials. Some of these materials already reside in library collections, but others will be developed in the course of scholarly research and added to library collections, along with the electronic publications that result from that research. The project will address new technical, procedural, and social issues that arise when scholars and libraries jointly create, maintain, and edit electronic data, said IATH director John Unsworth.

"The Mellon Foundation has historically been a stalwart supporter of higher education, and over the last decade they have shown a particular interest in the issues of electronic scholarly publishing and digital library collections development," Unsworth said. "We are very pleased to have their support in turning our attention to the next generation of digital library issues -- the issues that will inevitably arise once scholars everywhere begin using digital primary resources in the way that scholars at the University of Virginia already do."

Among key issues scholars and librarians face are how to handle changes in updated and revised electronic materials and how to devise new classification schemes when needed for new types of digital research, Unsworth said.

Since its inception in 1992, IATH has focused intensive support and advanced computer resources on long-term humanities research projects proposed by faculty at the University of Virginia and elsewhere. To date, IATH has supported more than 40 fellows in architecture, landscape architecture, architectural history, art history, religious studies, classics, anthropological linguistics, medieval and 19th-century British literature, 19th-century American literature, American history, classical history, history of science, archaeology, film, and music, among other disciplines.

The University of Virginia Library has been a leader in developing and adopting electronic resources, and in promoting faculty and student use of those resources. Library specialists work closely with IATH’s staff and fellows on electronic text, geospatial information, digital images, and digital video and audio. Most recently, the library has established a Digital Library Research and Development Group, charged with long-range planning of digital library systems and procedures.

"The job of building and maintaining a library collection really changes when scholars develop their research and teaching publications on-line," said Thornton Staples, director of the digital research group. "Not only are they building thematic research collections that include an assortment of media, but in many cases they need to comment on, edit, or annotate primary resources held separately in the digital library. This means that the library must provide the technical expertise and infrastructure to keep track of all of these pieces, their provenance, and their relations to one another. This grant will allow IATH and the library to collaborate in experimenting with new technical solutions and to develop and test the policies and procedures that will be required to manage a research library in the next century."

Previous support by the Mellon Foundation to digital research at U.Va. includes major grants to the University Library for its Early American Fiction digitization project, an extensive World Wide Web archive.

For interviews or additional information John Unsworth may be reached at (804) 924-3137 or jmu2m@virginia.edu

The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities is on the World Wide Web at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/

Contact: Bob Brickhouse, (804) 924-6856

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: please contact the Office of University Relations at (804) 924-7116. Television reporters should contact the TV News Office at (804) 924-7550.
SOURCE: U.Va. News Services

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