Mississippi State University Libraries has been selected as one of more than 200 recipients of grants totaling over $37 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The grant, managed by Lauren Geiger and Kate Gregory, will fund a preservation assessment of the audiovisual materials in the Mississippi Political Collections (MPC) unit, which documents twentieth- and early twenty-first-century movements, political figures, and significant public works projects in the state.
“This project presents us with a strategic opportunity to continue the vital work of preserving Mississippi’s history for future generations of students and teachers,” said David Nolen, Associate Dean of Archives and Special Collections. “This funding will allow us to make strides in assessing how best to preserve the priceless historical materials in our collections.”
Geiger, Digital Archivist for the University Libraries, said the grant will allow faculty to work with an A/V specialist to survey the audiovisual materials of five MPC collections: the papers of Senator John C. Stennis, Congressman G.V. “Sonny” Montgomery, Congressman Mike Espy, the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway Commission, and the Mississippi Republican Party. The specialist will then create a preservation plan to digitize them. The project will run from September 2024 to August 2025.
The University Libraries grant is funded through a special initiative called American Tapestry: Weaving Together Past, Present, and Future.
Gregory, Director of the Mississippi Political Collections, said being funded by the American Tapestry initiative is meaningful because "it is a recognition of the role we play in supporting the mission and vision of Mississippi State University."
“American Tapestry helps meet the needs of rural universities that, among other services, serve significant numbers of first-generation and nontraditional students, such as the vibrant student veteran community that the people represented in our collections worked to support—particularly Sonny Montgomery,” Gregory said. “We believe that humanities projects such as ours contribute to the overall quality of education that we provide to our student population. We also appreciate American Tapestry's support for political archives and how integral they are to the preservation of democracy.”
Gregory added that the opportunities for civic engagement, research, and education in political records are innumerable, and this grant will help the University Libraries expand access to the content of its audio/video holdings.
“I can't think of a better way for us to contribute to the university’s goal of taking care of what matters,” Gregory said.
Geiger added that they hope the end result will be an achievable preservation plan that will allow the libraries to focus on digitizing and preserving some of the most vulnerable analog material in the MPC.
“Digitized audio/video materials are an invaluable resource that connect researchers with the past in ways that text and photographs cannot. They allow researchers to hear the voices of the past and gain insight into the speakers' emotions on particular subjects,” Geiger said. “By having a plan in place to digitize these materials, we will increase their accessibility to the public and hope to foster more scholarship around the political history of Mississippi.”
For more information on the NEH grants visit, https://www.neh.gov/news/NEH-grant-awards-August-2024.
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH): Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at neh.gov.
