I rarely discuss my work projects here, but one has been so exciting lately that I can’t help but share. Last year KCPL was awarded a planning grant I wrote to inventory as many Civil War era primary sources as possible in a year. Perry Collins* and I were successful in inventorying 25,000 pages of primary sources from more than 25 potential contributing institutions. Following that grant I wrote another- this time to digitize 5,000 pages of those we inventoried. Once Congress finally passed this year’s budget, that grant received funding as well (we’re up to more than $150,000 in grant money so far). For the past few weeks it’s been crazy as I hire new staff (Hi Hannah Ballard and Alesha Terry- welcome!), iron out the wrinkles in our workflow, and write another grant to fund an extra fancy website and some original research tools (shhh… top secret).
We have launched a small promotional site for the project at www.CivilWarOnTheWesternBorder.org where you can find a timeline of Civil War events in our region. Our Library blog also did a feature on the project- you can read about it here. I’ll be sure to post more when more is available to share.
Jordan Fields 