The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has announced a new grant program to fund initiatives that make hidden collections available for research. From the CLIR website:

Libraries, archives, and cultural institutions hold millions of items that have never been adequately described. These items are all but unknown to, and unused by, the scholars those organizations aim to serve. According to a 1998 Association of Research Libraries’ survey of 99 North American research universities’ special collections, on average 15 percent of printed volumes in special collections are unprocessed or uncataloged. The figure rises to an average of 27 percent of manuscripts, and 35 percent and 37 percent of video and audio, respectively. Nationally, this represents a staggering volume of items of potentially substantive intellectual value that are unknown and inaccessible to scholars.

With generous funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources is creating a national program to identify and catalog hidden special collections and archives. The records and descriptions obtained through this effort will be accessible through the Internet and the Web, enabling the federation of disparate, local cataloging entries with tools to aggregate this information by topic and theme.

Institutions of higher education and cultural organizations that hold important collections that are difficult or impossible to locate through finding aids are invited to submit proposals for funding. CLIR will issue a formal request for proposals (RFP) by early June 2008. The deadline for proposal submission will be late July. Awards will be announced in fall 2008. Grant recipients will have three years to complete their project.

CLIR will appoint a panel to evaluate the proposals and will call upon experts in particular fields to assist in the review process when necessary. A key selection criterion will be the fundamental importance of the hidden collections to scholarship and teaching, always with the aim of significantly improving access to these materials.

The RFP will ask the applicant to provide information on the scope and depth of the hidden collection, its disciplinary focus, its value to research, the type of media it includes, and other descriptive elements that will help the review panel assess the intellectual impact of cataloging and exposing these materials. The RFP will also require the applicant to respond to questions about long-term sustainability, additional sources of funding, and evidence of institutional support.

Another review criterion is that the methodologies adopted by the funded projects be broadly applicable and able to be built upon over time. The means of data creation must be cost-effective and efficient, and must ensure that a critical mass of trusted and authoritative information is generated quickly. The program’s strategy for building a distributed organization of cataloging and collection information assumes local autonomy and responsibility but also requires centralized agreements concerning governing principles that will ensure enterprise-wide coherence. All nonconfidential information gathered and generated through this program will be available through the Web.

The program will initially produce two layers of information: (1) a basic registry of hidden collections and archives, created from information in the proposals, that can be found through a Web-based platform; and (2) a descriptive record of a subset of collections that are deemed most urgently in need of cataloging and documentation. The record will evolve as funded proposals are completed. CLIR anticipates that this project will eventually lead to the creation of a third layer of information—digital versions of the special collections and archives that have been cataloged. The digitization effort will be funded by other sources.

More information is available from CLIR