ANN ARBOR—The University of Michigan Library has received a $430,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to expand U-M’s Making of America (MoA) project.

Known as the American Voice, 1850-1876, the 18-month conversion effort will expand the online collections and tools developed during the original MoA project, and will seek to establish benchmarks and guidelines for the digital preservation of materials, according to project director Maria Bonn, assistant librarian at the University Library.

Primary purpose of the effort is to produce a handbook for the library community and the Mellon Foundation, which documents a model of accomplishing both preservation and access, says Bonn. The effective methods and costs represented in the handbook will assist the Mellon Foundation in evaluating and guiding future conversion projects, and establish a model for conversion which is cost-effective, migratable to future technologies, and of interest and available to a wide audience.

More than 7,500 monographs will be converted and added to the current MoA online collection of 19th century American journal articles and monographs. The resulting electronic resource will represent a significant percentage of materials published in the United States during latter half of the 19th century, and will be available freely over the Internet.

“Published almost entirely on acidic paper, these materials are deteriorating rapidly and it is only through efforts such as the American Voice that these materials will remain available and accessible for future generations,” says Bonn. “The American Voice represents a powerful marriage of preservation and access, bringing new vitality to preservation efforts and ensuring that the information in these resources is available to vast new audiences.

“At the conclusion of the American Voice project, the MoA collection will represent one of the largest bodies of resources freely available over the Internet; a true digital library documenting American social history during the second half of the 19th century. This body of materials will be so substantial as to transform both the perception of the size of collections on the Internet, and the way in which libraries approach conversion activity.”

The American Voice will draw upon the preservation, system development, interface design, and digital conversion expertise of the U-M Library. The project began last month and will conclude July 2000. The foundation collection for this project, the Making of America, can be found at www.umdl.umich.edu/moa/.

For more information about the American Voice, contact Bonn at (734) 763-3343 or [email protected].

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