Recent Events in Special Collections
Updates to Grants and Projects in 2004
The Renaissance in Print: Sixteenth-Century French Books in the Douglas Gordon Collection
Bust of Douglas Gordon, housed in the University of Virginia Special Collections DepartmentThanks to the generous support of The Florence Gould Foundation, The University of Virginia Library and the University of Virginia French Department have launched an ambitious collaborative project that will make rare books from the French Renaissance era accessible to the public via the Internet. The online collection will include digital facsimiles of sixteenth-century printed books in the Douglas H. Gordon Collection and an on-line network of resources designed to situate the books within the rich context of the French Renaissance, which produced them.
See the most recent activity here
This project's goal is twofold: to preserve the texts digitally and to expand their role in the University of Virginia's mission of research and instruction. The Gordon project's first objective will span two years and will focus on the digitization of the texts. Watch this page and the Special Collections Gordon page for updated details.
For questions related to this project or to find out how you can help, contact Bradley Daigle, Associate Director of Rare Materials Digital Services: digitalservices@virginia.edu.
See What's Happening with the Collections Preservation and Processing Planning Project
The Special Collections Department of the University of Virginia Library received a grant of $265,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop and implement a Collections Preservation and Processing Planning Project. The grant project will support a comprehensive survey of the Special Collections' manuscripts and archives holdings in order to formulate a long range Collections Preservation and Processing Plan.
The survey will use qualitative and quantitative measures to rank each collection's research value as well as the state of the collection's intellectual access, physical access, housing, and condition. These data will in turn help determine priorities for cataloging and preservation to be outlined in a Collections Preservation and Processing Plan. The Collections Preservation and Processing Plan will not only list priorities for processing and preservation, but also will include estimates of the time needed to complete work on each collection.
Collections that can be processed relatively quickly will be prioritized for in-house treatment, while those that are larger, or in need of more significant work, will become the subjects of proposals for future project funding. As needs are met, as researcher interests change, and as new collections are added, we will update the databases and the plans informed by them. The results of the survey will allow us to prepare for cooperative ventures within Virginia for the reduction of unprocessed collections.