I. SIGNIFICANCE

A. Introduction

The University of Virginia, representing VIVA, the Virtual Library of Virginia, is seeking funding for the preparation of a union database of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) tagged finding aids to manuscript and archival resources held in the special collections of eleven members of VIVA. The database will be freely available on the Internet to scholars, students and citizens worldwide. Founded in 1994, VIVA consists of the libraries of the thirty-nine state-assisted colleges and universities within the Commonwealth of Virginia, and an additional twenty-nine independent, not-for-profit educational institutions. VIVA's mission is to provide, in an equitable, cooperative and cost-effective manner, enhanced access to library and information resources for Virginia's research libraries serving the higher education community. VIVA is well positioned to coordinate the preparation of a nationally important union database documenting American history and culture. The Virginia Heritage Project will initially draw on collections held by the University of Virginia, the College of William and Mary, George Mason University, the Library of Virginia, Old Dominion University, Virginia Commonwealth University, the Virginia Historical Society, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, the Virginia Military Institute, Virginia State University, and Washington and Lee University (see Appendix C, Description of the Participating Institutions and Their Special Collections). These eleven institutions have already committed significant time and resources to assuring the success of this ambitious consortial undertaking (see Appendix F, Letters of Commitment) and have pledge to assign the equivalent of four fulltime employees for the duration of the project.

The Virginia Heritage Project will provide a new level of comprehensive, standards-based intellectual access to a nationally significant body of research materials. The project will set in place the necessary infrastructure of expertise, hardware and software so that the participants will be able to add new EAD-encoded finding aids to the union database on an ongoing basis. The ultimate goal of the Virginia Heritage Project goal is to incorporate this state-of-the-art approach as an essential operational activity of the eleven participating institutions. The project will also lay the foundation for expansion to include the holdings of the other members of VIVA.

B. The Virginia Heritage Project

From the settlement at Jamestown in 1607, through the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and into the tumult of the 20th century, the Commonwealth of Virginia has stood at the center of America's history. Many of the priceless documents of American history, literature and political thought reside in the special collections of Virginia's colleges, universities, and other research libraries. The Virginia Heritage Project has two primary goals. The first goal is the creation of a large union database of EAD tagged finding aids (approximately 35,000 pages) to archival collections in Virginia. The second goal is the development and implementation of a model for statewide dissemination of and training in newly emerging library standards and technologies.

Traditionally, the principal means of accessing the collections at these repositories has been to travel to each repository and page through a variety of highly specific and idiosyncratic paper finding aids. Because these finding aids have been the primary means of access to these collections, they are extraordinarily rich in detail, particularly for named persons, institutions, places, subjects, and events. In the last few years, USMARC catalog records for many of the collections have expanded access to the online environment, but their summary approach cannot begin to provide the additional access points needed by users.

Given the previous lack of descriptive standards for finding aids, the format and content of the existing finding aids included in this project vary not only from repository to repository but also within each institution over time. By upgrading finding aids in need of clarification or refined formatting, and by providing uniform EAD markup and application of standards, which will result in clear and consistent presentation of content, the Virginia Heritage Project will provide integrated, consistent, and expanded online access to information about the collections held by these institutions. The union database will allow users worldwide to search standardized finding aids from all participating institutions in a seamless, integrated fashion. Scholars throughout the world will be able to access not only bibliographic records for primary resource materials in their areas of interest but, with collection inventories also available on the Internet, they will be able to plan their research strategies in advance to make optimum use of limited research time and funds. Researchers will no longer need to travel from institution to institution to consult directly with staff in order to discover what other relevant resources are available at each repository. They will be able to search all holdings from any location, identifying materials of interest at the major repositories in Virginia. Thus, from their desktops, users may discover new links among physically-distant collections. Scholars have expressed great enthusiasm for this project (see Appendix G, Letters of Support from Scholars). The database will also be a valuable resource for elementary and secondary school teachers and their students. Virginia's newly adopted Standards of Learning (URL: http://www.pen.k12.va.us/go/Sols/) mandate that all Virginia high school students will develop skills for historical analysis, including the ability to analyze documents, records, and data, such as artifacts, diaries, letters, photographs, journals, newspapers, and historical accounts. The Virginia Heritage Project database will facilitate discovery of and access to important primary source materials.

The Virginia Heritage Project, like other statewide projects, will establish a central unit for the conversion of finding aids to EAD, but extends the emerging model developed in these projects with its ambitious focus on the dissemination and decentralization of EAD processing during the period of the grant. The design of the proposed union database for the Virginia Heritage Project is informed by other cooperative digital library projects, including the American Heritage Virtual Archive Project, the Making of America testbed projects, the California Digital Library projects, and the Online Archive of New Mexico project. The goals of upgrading and converting 35,000 pages of finding aids while conducting extensive training and dissemination activities involving the eleven participating institutions are admittedly very ambitious. In comparison, the Online Archive of New Mexico project, which received a $328,649 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1999, will convert only 13,000 pages of finding aids and involves only four institutions. The goals of the present project are attainable because of the support offered by VIVA and the technological leadership provided by the University of Virginia.

The Virginia Heritage Project will establish its EAD processing center at the University of Virginia, which will provide the technological leadership for the project. As the first phase of the project, the processing center will encode and provide online access to approximately 15,000 pages of finding aids; these finding aids represent more than 1,000 collections on African American history and culture and are drawn from all eleven participating institutions. In addition, the processing center will encode 10,000 related pages drawn from the general Virginiana collections of the University of Virginia; these collections are not only valuable in their own right, but also are rich in resources that will help to place the African-American materials in context.

Concurrent with the first phase of the project, the processing center at the University of Virginia will provide extensive training and support to the other ten participating VIVA institutions. Five institutions will begin their own in-house processing of EAD finding aids during the first year of the project (the College of William and Mary, George Mason University, Old Dominion University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) and the other five will begin in-house processing during the second year (the Library of Virginia, the Virginia Historical Society, Virginia State University, the Virginia Military Institute, and Washington and Lee University). By the end of the two-year period, these additional processing centers will contribute an additional 10,000 pages (for a project total of 35,000 pages) of EAD-encoded finding aids to other Virginiana collections to the Virginia Heritage Project's union database. Each of the participating institutions will in turn begin to provide training and support in EAD processing and conversion to other nearby members of VIVA. At the conclusion of the project, a minimum of twenty-two archivists, librarians and staff across Virginia will be proficient in the use and application of EAD. The Virginia Heritage Project, like other statewide projects, will establish a central unit for the conversion of finding aids to EAD, but extends the emerging model developed in these projects with its ambitious focus on the dissemination and decentralization of EAD processing during the period of the grant.

The VIVA Special Collections Committee began work on the Virginia Heritage Project in the summer of 1998. During the late summer, the Committee conducted an initial survey (see section II.B., below) of the archival repositories held in the special collections of the public four-year colleges and universities. This survey solicited information on subject areas covered, finding aids, time period of the collections, equipment available, and institutional progress on digitization. Given the overwhelming amount of available material held by the participating institutions, the VIVA Special Collections Committee decided to select a unifying theme for the development of the union database. After surveying the holdings of the participating institutions (see section II.B., below), the Committee selected materials relating to African-American history and culture. These finding aids will provide scholars with information about a rich and important intellectual resource of enduring scholarly interest.

C. African-American Resources in Virginia Repositories

The first phase of work on the Virginia Heritage Project will focus on the more than 1,000 collections (15,000 pages of finding aids) documenting African-American history and culture held by the eleven participating VIVA institutions. (See Appendix I, Selected African-American Collection Finding Aids to Be Encoded) Virginia is especially important to African-American studies because, until the mid-nineteenth century, it had a larger African-American population than any other state, and its economics and culture differed from the large cotton plantations of the Deep South. In 1990, Michael Plunkett, Director of Special Collections at the University of Virginia and an advisor for this project, published the first edition of his Afro-American Sources in Virginia: A Guide to Manuscripts, (Charlottesville, Va. : University Press of Virginia, 1990) a collection level description (title, size, and a one sentence synopsis) of materials located in twenty-three Virginia repositories. Plunkett's Guide is an important resource for anyone researching African-American history and culture because of the state's significant role in those fields. The reasons for Virginia's significance are set forth in the foreword to the first edition:

[A]s late as 1860 Virginia still had more Afro-Americans (and more slaves) than did any other state. For all the writings on antebellum slavery, we still have much to learn about the distinct economics and culture of slavery in Virginia. While most writings focus on the cotton South with its large plantations, Virginia slavery was characterized by relatively small Š farms, growing mainly tobacco and wheat. Thus in many important dimensions slavery in Virginia was different, for slaves and for masters, than slavery elsewhere in the South. . . . The atypical pattern of slavery in Virginia also makes the transition from slavery to freedom, and the economic and social adjustments to emancipation, a particularly interesting subject for examination. For this period, as for the slave era, much of the recent work on political and economic changes has concentrated upon those parts of the South in which the plantation had been the dominant institution. Yet to more fully understand the impact of emancipation, particularly in its economic aspects, attention to areas with smaller farms, growing a different set of crops, is important. The focus would contribute, for example, to the analysis of the factors explaining postemancipation declines in agricultural production in the South, which appear to have been smaller in Virginia than elsewhere in the South. . . . Not only would we expect the economic effects of the end of slavery in Virginia to differ from those elsewhere, but because of the differences in the relative numbers of blacks and whites (among other reasons) we would also anticipate variations in the social, cultural, and political consequences. . . . Moreover, the differences in the social and economic adaptations made in the migration northward by those Afro-Americans born in Virginia and those born elsewhere in the South means that studies of Virginia slavery and emancipation will have wider implications.

In the preface to the first edition, Plunkett observed that archivists in Virginia had begun consciously seeking out materials on blacks and other non-elite groups as part of a general expansion of both scholarly and popular approaches to the Old Dominion's past. At that time, Plunkett reported that most of the relevant collections were family papers and derivative in nature, that is, whites writing about blacks. The strengths of these collections concentrated in two areas: materials on slavery and materials on the civil rights era. The family papers and plantation records that document slavery in Virginia, such as those in the collections of the College of William and Mary and the University of Virginia, have been and will continue to be invaluable for scholarship. (See Appendix H, Citations of Works Acknowledging Use of Special Collections at the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary)

Nine years after the original publication of Plunkett's work, the VIVA Special Collections Committee's survey (see section II.B., below) demonstrates that holdings of materials for African-American history and culture have continued to grow, with archivists building upon existing collection strengths and laying the documentary foundations for research into other areas of interest. Although Plunkett's Guide is an important resource for discovery, online finding aids that describe these collections will provide users with greater detail about the content and relevance of materials in the collections and will bring together related, but physically-distant collections.

Since 1990, Virginia repositories have added numerous collections relevant for study of the civil rights struggle in Virginia. The papers of political leaders contain correspondence from constituents that provide insights into changes in public opinion as well as materials that document struggles over the state's policy of massive resistance to desegregation. In addition there are collections that document the efforts of citizens to prevent the closing of the state's public schools, and, at Virginia State University, the Prince Edward County Free School Papers that reveal the great difficulty in continuing education for blacks in that county when the public schools closed for five years. There are also important collections of leaders such as voting-rights activists John Mitchell Brooks and William Ferguson Reid, civil rights attorney Samuel Wilbert Tucker, and transcripts of an interview with civic activist Vivian Carter Mason. Among the recent acquisitions at University of Virginia are the papers of the Southern Elections Fund, ca. 1968-75, including professional and personal correspondence of Julian Bond, the Fund's chairman.

The most important expansion in the collections relevant to African American history and culture has occurred in materials for study of the period from the end of slavery to the beginning of the desegregation struggle, when black Virginians built their own community institutions. Among the most important of those institutions are the state's historically black universities, such as Virginia State University, and their archives and the collections of faculty papers constitute a documentary record of achievement and service. There are also records of professional societies, such as the Old Dominion Dental Society and the Old Dominion Bar Association, of voluntary associations, of schools, and of churches. The organizations and leaders of the civil rights era stood upon this foundation of community institution building in Virginia. Moreover, historians will be better able to employ the materials available about slavery with improved access to the records of the Virginia black community's post-bellum institutions. What black Virginians attempted and achieved after Emancipation give revealing clues as to the nature of the slave and free black communities before 1865, showing both what was present to enable these people to act so quickly on their freedom and, by their aspirations, what was withheld from them under the slave regime.

The VIVA Special Collections Committee's survey (see section II.B., below) also demonstrates that, of these collections, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. With the ability to search electronic finding aids to the collections, a researcher interested in the history of education will discover that documents about the Christiansburg Industrial Institute are housed both at Virginia State University and at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. A researcher interested in religious history will discover that the records of a Petersburg Baptist congregation are housed at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Those doing research on Virginia's policy of "massive resistance" to school integration will find resources on the Prince Edward County school closings at Virginia State University, the University of Virginia, and the Library of Virginia. Together, the collections held by the VIVA institutions document the full span of Virginia's history, and are a treasure trove for historical research on all aspects of African-American history and culture.

D. Virginiana Collections

The Virginiana collections at the participating VIVA institutions contain important documents that reach back to the first European settlements in North America. Indeed, the collections in Virginia repositories document the entire sweep of American history from early colonial ventures, through the Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States, to the dissolution of the Union during the Civil War and up to the present day. The eleven participating institutions hold more than 100 million manuscripts and archival records that document Virginia's history, and therefore the history of the United States. Each institution will select from its unique holdings the major collections that support and provide context for the central core of African American materials. The Virginia Heritage Project will encode 20,000 pages of finding aids to these collections during the course of the project. The processing center at the University of Virginia will encode 10,000 pages of finding aids drawn chiefly from the collections of the University of Virginia. The remaining 10,000 pages will be encoded by staff at the other ten participating institutions.

In addition to the early records of colonial Virginia, the Virginiana collections contain materials that document many other facets of American life. The executive records of Virginia governors from the eighteenth through the twentieth century are held by the Library of Virginia. Personal papers of governors such as Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, James Barbour, William H. Cabell, Thomas Walker Gilmer, Henry Alexander Wise, Harry Byrd, Sr., Colgate W. Darden, John S. Battle, James Lindsay Almond, Mills E. Godwin, Jr., and Douglas Wilder are distributed among many of the participating institutions. For example, the personal papers of Mills E. Godwin, Jr. are at the College of William and Mary, and the personal papers of Harry Byrd, Sr. are at the University of Virginia. These records are critical for tracing the political evolution of African-American rights in Virginia.

Virginia was the major battleground during the Civil War. Important Civil War collections include the Robert E. Lee papers at Washington and Lee University, the papers of Jedidiah Hotchkiss, cartographer to Stonewall Jackson, at the University of Virginia, the Stonewall Jackson papers at the Virginia Military Institute, and countless letters of ordinary soldiers at all of the participating institutions. George Mason University, Old Dominion University and Virginia Commonwealth University hold collections that document the twentieth-century urban experience in Virginia. (See Appendix C, Description of the Participating Institutions and Their Special Collections and Appendix J: Selected Virginiana Collection Finding Aids to be Encoded) Both the Civil War collections and the recent materials on urban life are examples of Virginiana collections that, while of great significance in their own right, also provide important contextual support for the African-American materials included in the Virginia Heritage Project.