11/18/08
UI Libraries Contributing to Digital Humanities Scholarship
Traditionally humanities researchers have worked independently. Yet as this model of scholarship is changing to a more collaborative model, researchers are using social networks to support an open exchange of knowledge. Several new digital collaborative projects are providing the tools for this new scholarship and are incorporating high-quality primary resource collections.
When the University of Iowa Libraries’ collection of letters by British writer James Henry Leigh Hunt went online last year, this was one step of many to provide a high-quality primary resource necessary for digital humanities scholarship. Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters digital collection, which has been built with the support of a $20,000 grant from the Gladys Krieble Delma Foundation, will eventually include 1,600 autograph letters from 1790-1858, as well as transcripts and catalog records for those letters.
Unlike digitization projects that offer only the text of correspondence, this digital collection will present images of the autograph letters, be full-text searchable and provide scholarly transcripts of the letters. These enhancements are part of reason that Leigh Hunt Online has been accepted into the NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) project.
NINES is a scholarly organization whose primary goal is establishing an integrated publishing environment for aggregated, peer-reviewed online scholarship centered in nineteenth-century studies. Currently NINES links records for 300,000 digital objects from projects hosted at many different institutions. For the Leigh Hunt Online collection, information about the author, date and subject of the letters, as well as a thumbnail image, will be available at NINES, while a durable url will lead the searcher directly from NINES to our digital collection. As well as providing another portal for discovery, NINES enhances the digital collections it aggregates by providing tools that aid in collation and comparative analysis of electronic resources.
3/18/08
UI Libraries Receives Grant to Create Digital Collection of Romantic Poet’s Letters
The University of Iowa Libraries has been awarded a $20,000 grant from The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation to create a digital collection of British writer James Henry Leigh Hunt’s correspondence. This collaborative project draws on The University of Iowa’s collection of Hunt materials as well as the research files of Dr. David R. Cheney (1922-2006), an Iowa alumnus and Hunt scholar, whose papers are held at the Ward M. Canaday Center at the University of Toledo Libraries.
The Libraries will digitize 1,600 autograph letters from 1790-1858, Cheney’s transcripts, and catalog records. Unlike digitization projects that offer only the text of correspondence, this digital collection will present images of the autograph letters, be full-text searchable, and provide scholarly transcripts of the letters. A description of the project can be found at www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/leighhunt/index.html. The digitized letters will become part of the Iowa Digital Library.
The UI Libraries acquired a substantial collection of Hunt materials in 1933 from the estate of Cedar Rapids publisher Luther Brewer. Over the ensuing years, the Libraries has continued to expand this collection.
Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), Romantic writer, editor, critic and contemporary of Byron, Shelley, and Keats was at the center of the literary and publishing world in London during the Romantic and Victorian periods of the early 19th century. His extensive correspondence reflects his intimate knowledge of literary, artistic, political and religious spheres in these key periods of British cultural history. Hunt eagerly penned thousands of letters, many of which survive.
“It is a great honor,” Sid Huttner, Head of Special Collections said, “to bring together the Libraries’ 80 years of collecting Hunt’s letters, often one by one; Cheney’s lifetime work; and the generosity of the Delmas Foundation to create a resource that promises to enrich 19th century scholarship in fundamental ways.”
The granting agency, The Delmas Foundation emphasizes the support of research libraries, among other areas, “to improve the ability of research libraries to serve the needs of scholarship in the humanities and the performing arts, and to help make their resources more widely accessible to scholars and the general public.”
“Working with these letters has been an exciting project,” says Nana Holtsnider, project manager and Ruth Bywater Olson Fellow in Special Collections. “I’ve been able to delve into a very important collection and develop a venue to make these intriguing letters more accessible to researchers and scholars.”
