In February 2005, the Archives received an award of $3.6 million from the Terra Foundation for American Art to dramatically increase the accessibility of its resources. The grant is being used to fund a comprehensive, 6 year program to digitize a substantial cross-section of the Archives' most important holdings. These include the papers of a highly diverse range of artists and arts-related figures, from the 18th century to the present. At the end of the project, an estimated 1.6 million digital files will be available to the public.

The road to digitization begins with processing each collection and preparing a finding aid. The Archives follows the archival profession's standardized EAD (Encoded Archival Description) format for finding aids. The EAD tagged data will serve as the metadata structure from which the image files are linked and presented online.

The Terra Foundation grant supports a processing team consisting of two full-time archivists, an archives technician, and a part-time encoding archivist.

After processing, the collection is turned over the scanning technician, who saves the digital files into a file structure that corresponds to the box/folder arrangement of the actual collection.

The Web Developer/Computer Programmer position funded by Terra supports the development of the online presentation of the digital files.

Between August 20, 2005, when the digital scanner replaced the microfilm camera, and November 1, 2006, a total of 14,769 files were produced. Among the collections scanned are: Winslow Homer, Grant Wood, Romare Bearden, and Alexander Calder.

For a complete list of collections to be processed and digitized, see Terra Foundation for American Art Digitization Project.

The Terra Foundation grant also enables the Archives to build upon its first digitization effort, begun in 2002 with funding from the Beinecke Foundation, to digitize individual photographs, sketchbooks, letters, scrapbooks, and other documents, using a 35m camera with a Better Light scanback. These images are used in online exhibitions, publications, and to fulfill researchers' requests for reproductions. The metadata structure developed for this operation is a database developed in Microsoft SQL. The grant supports the Digital Imaging Technician and a Cataloger, with support from the Computer Programmer and an Archives Technician. The images are then accessible via the Archives' Search Images interface.

To fully support the Archives' digitization program, the Terra Foundation's funding has allowed the Archives to launch a redesign of its web site. This is an opportunity over the five-year period to expand web functionality to meet the complex demands of presenting digital content in new and interesting ways, through online exhibitions, guides, hand-held devices, and the other new technologies that will inevitably surface.

For more information email Karen Weiss at weissk@si.edu.

Amy Morgan scanning the Grant Wood papers using the Zeutschel K1000AI digital scanner

Marv Hoffmeier focuses the 35mm camera with Better Light scan back in AAA's Digital Imaging Center.