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| ABSTRACT The study of U.S. history in general and more specifically the fields of Women’s Studies and Labor History have been radically affected by the availability of resources on the World Wide Web. Increasingly, institutions are creating databases of digital materials related to these fields of study and making them available through locally designed search engines. However, no national level cooperative or community exists to approach the digitization of these materials from a unified approach. In this one-year project, Wayne State University in collaboration with Georgia State University will create a universally accessible, unique, research quality web portal for increasing access to a multi-institutional collection of 5,000 digital images of “Women@Work”. The partners are providing $88,094 and are seeking $166,156 (65%) from IMLS for the project. The total project costs are $255,940. The collections represent significant holdings of international interest to anyone studying working women. The resulting repository of digitized primary source materials will offer students, teachers, scholars, and “lifelong learners” new ways to study the role of working women. All resources will be freely accessible on the World Wide Web. The partners share a short-term goal to digitize images from America’s largest regional labor archives and to create a unique research quality resource that is accessible to anyone on the World Wide Web. Long-term the institutions share a goal of building on the collaboration to establish the framework necessary to support an “Urban Digital Library Federation”, an organization of Urban 13 institutions who together guide and enable the development of innovative digital library initiatives at America’s top urban institutions. While digitization projects such as this one can be found in many institutions, among the “Urban 13” they appear to be concentrated among only a few. Many of these institutions have valuable and unique collections that are perfect candidates for digitization. However, the institutions may lack the resources necessary to carry out large scale digitization efforts. Our project addresses this issue by partnering an experienced digital library program (Wayne State University) with one that is looking to upgrade to a more sophisticated system (Georgia State University). Our project will be guided by a three-pronged approach. First, we will create a resource that virtually unites the collections from our institutions making use of best practices that already exist for such collections. Second, while creating this resource we will form an “Urban Digital Library Federation” to advance digitization efforts among urban institutions. Third, our project will act as a model for training information professionals in the creation, description, and management of digital projects. The project will be guided by the “Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials” developed by the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH). The guideline addresses digitization issues such as project planning, material selection, copyright and intellectual property, quality control, sustainability, evaluation, metadata and preservation. The guideline can be found at: http://www.nyu.edu/its/humanities/ninchguide/
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