Library Receives Cultural Heritage Grant

We received exciting news at the library—we were awarded a $15,000 grant to purchase equipment capable of scanning and digitizing the library’s collection of rare books, newspapers, journals, and other documents. Purchasing such equipment has long been one of the library’s goals as it is the first necessary step in the important work of preserving and digitizing the library’s rare collections. Here is the announcement of the award:

EMC AWARDS ‘INFORMATION HERITAGE’ GRANTS TO PRESERVE AND PROTECT THE WORLD’S CULTURAL INFORMATION
Eight Organizations From Around the World Honored as Information Heritage Stewards

HOPKINTON, Mass.—May, 23, 2011—EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that eight organizations will receive EMC Heritage Trust Project grants through the company’s Information Heritage Initiative program. The 2011 grants will support projects that digitize, protect and improve access to cultural information in communities around the world. Through the initiative, EMC has donated more than $20 million to date to help advance the preservation and accessibility of information heritage.
“Photographs, ancient writings, letters, film, music and visual art are all part of the world’s information heritage. Yet many of these historical treasures are at risk of disappearing,” said Bill Teuber, Vice Chairman, EMC Corporation. “Through the EMC Heritage Trust Project, we are dedicated to helping local community organizations worldwide preserve and protect these historic artifacts so that future generations can continue to enjoy and learn from them.”
The EMC Information Heritage Initiative program was formalized in 2007 to recognize organizations and individuals that protect and preserve invaluable cultural information from around the world through digitization, allowing readily accessible online research and education. Using the same criteria for excellence that guide this initiative and deployed in local communities, the EMC Heritage Trust Project was created to recognize and support people and projects that practice and inspire the digital stewardship of the world’s information heritage. For 2011, EMC received 95 applications from 19 countries for grant consideration.
The EMC Heritage Trust Project grant recipients were selected based on the following criteria: potential size of the audience that would benefit from access to this information; the at-risk status of the information and why it is urgent to digitize; and how significant the EMC grant would be to the overall success of the project.

The 2011 EMC Heritage Trust Project grantees are:

Canada: C.B. “Bud” Johnston Library, Western Libraries, University of Western Ontario -- The EMC grant will help digitize the entire Canadian Annual Reports Collection, the largest collection of corporate annual reports representing over 6,300 companies dating back as far as the 1920s.

Chile: Organización Comunitaria Funcional (OCF) Londres 38, Memorial House -- The EMC grant will help expand the digital archive and update the online reference catalogue of Londres 38, a memorial space, to help protect records of the memories associated with the repression and violation of human rights that took place in Chile.

Chile: General Historic Archives of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile -- The EMC grant will digitize 3,000 photographs from the General Historic Archive collection making them more readily accessible online. Most of these original photographs portray a wide range of Chilean and foreign social, political and diplomatic historical episodes from 1876 to 2006.

China: The Tongji University Library -- The EMC grant will digitize unique and valuable information from the Tongji University Library’s collection of books and antiquated texts published during the Republic of China. These resources are significant to the history of city planning and architectural development in the Yangtze River Delta.

Ireland: Boole Library, University College, Cork -- The EMC grant will support the creation of a publicly available digital archive of printed books and papers of mathematician George Boole. Boole laid the foundations in the latter half of the nineteenth century for a system of mathematical expression which formed the basis for all modern computer languages.

Kyrgyzstan: Public Association “Kyrgyz Kitep Borboru” -- The EMC grant will support the digitization of early Kyrgyz books in Arabic type, making selected resources available to the public. Resources include handwritten books and manuscripts which preserve and transmit the history, geography, and ethnography of their time.

Rwanda: Aegis Trust -- The EMC grant will support the creation of a unified digital repository of the Genocide Archive of Rwanda. Resources including audiovisual testimonies, historical photographs, documents, newspapers, and genocide victims’ information will be digitized and indexed to make the collection available to the public.

Ukraine: Crimean Tatar Library (in the name of I. Gasprinskiy) -- The EMC grant will digitize the Gasprinskiy Library’s collection of rare books and documents in order to preserve and publicize Crimean Tatar literature, language, culture, and history.

For more information on the EMC Heritage Trust Project, please visit: www.EMC.com/heritage_trust.

About EMC
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world’s leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. Information about EMC’s products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.