US grants support digitisation

The US Department of Education has awarded more than $2 million in grants to develop techniques or programmes that access, collect, organise, preserve, and widely disseminate information on world regions and countries other than the USA.

The funds were awarded through the Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) programme of the office of Postsecondary Education, International Education Programs Service. The latest four-year awards will support 13 projects running until 2013.

These projects include the University of Chicago, which received a grant to create digital versions of historical audio recordings, maps, and images of South Asia and deliver them via the Digital South Asia Library. The Center for Research Libraries, the British Library, and the Roja Muthiah Research Library will collaborate on the project.

Another grant went to the American Institute of Yemeni Studies (AIYS) and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC). Its Digital Library for International Research (DLIR) is cataloguing and digitising photographic, ethnographic, archaeological, cartographic, and other scholarly research support materials from a variety of international locations.

Other awards help digitise a range of different types of resources from across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and the Middle East.