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UW-Madison Libraries: Partners in $400,000 NEH preservation grant on railroads
By Kristin Knipschild
Library Communications
Posted 7/20/2004
MADISON, Wis. -- The University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries is a key partner in a nearly $400,000 preservation project. Through a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the libraries will be preserving fragile materials about U.S. railroads and their influence on American life, landscape, history and technology.
Library systems from four CIC universities will work with UW-Madison Libraries on the $393,000 project: the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Iowa and Northwestern University. The project will reformat many fragile materials to archival-quality microfilm and also repair any damage so the originals may be available to researchers as long as possible. Many of these materials are made of acidic, brittle paper that is vulnerable to further deterioration and eventual damage or loss. While the majority of the items being preserved are published serials, a number of monographs, pamphlets and some primary source materials are also included in the collection.
"Over the years, generous support from NEH has allowed us to preserve many collections whose needs would have been difficult to address within our normal operating budgets," said Andrea Rolich, senior academic librarian in the Preservation Department at UW-Madison Libraries. "We look forward to making these important historical and cultural resources more widely available to researchers and scholars." Rolich co-directs the railroad materials preservation project with Senior Academic Librarian Sandra Paske, also from UW-Madison Libraries.
Upon completion of the project, an estimated 1195 volumes (438,963 exposures) of microfilms will be preserved to a condition sufficient for future digital access projects. Complete bibliographic records describing these newly preserved materials will be entered into OCLC and RLIN databases, making their existence widely known to the international community of scholars.
"One might think that the history of American railroads has been 'done,' that it is no longer generating important work. But that is not the case at all," said Colleen Dunlavy, professor of history at the UW-Madison. "The proposed microfilming project would do a great deal to make the most significant works readily accessible to researchers."
Founded in 1958, the CIC is the academic consortium of 12 research universities including the 11 members of the Big Ten Athletic Conference and the University of Chicago. Together, CIC member universities confer nearly 15 percent of the Ph.D. degrees awarded in the United States annually, employ more that 33,000 faculty and enroll nearly one-half million students. CIC member institutions include the Universities of Chicago, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and
Wisconsin-Madison as well as Indiana, Michigan State, Northwestern, Ohio State, Pennsylvania State and Purdue Universities. For more information about the CIC, visit their Web site.
