grant

Library Receives CPA Grant to Digitize “Black Art and Joy in Boston (and Beyond)”

Black and white image of Elma Lewis writing at a desk while wearing a cap and gown
Elma Lewis at the New England Conservatory of Music where she was conferred an honorary degree in 1977

The Northeastern University Library is proud to announce that the Archives and Special Collections has been awarded a City of Boston Community Preservation Act (CPA) grant to fund the project Black Art and Joy in Boston (and Beyond): Elma Lewis and the National Center of Afro-American Artists. This grant of almost $460,000 will support the digitization, cataloging, and publication of primary source materials from four archival collections that document the extraordinary work of Elma Lewis (1921-2004) and the cultural institutions she founded.

Dan Cohen, Vice President for Information Collaboration and Dean of the Northeastern University Library, said, “The University Archives and Special Collections department carefully preserves and protects access to some of the deep history and stories of Boston’s Black community. This project will augment and complement their and the Library’s Digital Production team’s effort to digitize significant portions of the Freedom House’s historical collection. We are thrilled to partner with the City of Boston and the Community Preservation team on this project.”

Lewis was a transformative force who trained a full generation of African American dancers, singers, musicians, actors, and visual artists in Boston. She formed the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1950 and established the National Center of Afro-American Artists in 1968, along with its museum in 1969. Her outsized influence on the Black arts movement in Boston, and how her ideas and techniques spread nationally and internationally, represents a crucial chapter in the city’s cultural history.

Black and white image of ballet dance class
A ballet class at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, 1975
A green program for the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts Children's Theatre presentation of FACES (A Play with Music)
A program for a children’s play at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1981

This project amplifies the voices of those who were in Lewis’s orbit as teachers, collaborators, or students. It also highlights the influence of Afrocentric organizations on Boston, a necessary element to understanding Black civil rights work in the city and the rich network of organizations and individuals focused on community-building and empowerment.

The digitized collections will shed light on the decades of labor and coalition-building that are foundational to Boston’s existing Black arts infrastructure. By publishing them online, we make this history accessible to Bostonians at any time and for any purpose, while also reaching larger local and national audiences through participation in Digital Commonwealth and the Digital Public Library of America.

The curricular potential of this collection represents one of its most valuable forms of impact. The project will build on the successful Boston Public Schools Desegregation Collection, a collaboratively built collection of scanned archival materials documenting the desegregation of Boston’s public schools, in collaboration with the district itself. That project demonstrated how archival materials can be integrated into K-12 curriculum design, bringing primary source materials directly into classrooms across the city.

An archival box from the Elma Lewis collection, with a selection of photos and papers
A box of archival materials from National Center of Afro-American Artists records and some of its contents

These digital collections will enable Bostonians, including relatives and friends of those who appear in the collections, to access this evidence of their community’s rich cultural history. The materials will be freely available online, searchable, and integrated with our existing digital collections to provide a deeper and richer pool of resources illustrating the activities and accomplishments of Boston’s Black residents and leaders.

As we embark on this preservation effort, we honor not only Elma Lewis’s remarkable legacy but also the ongoing vitality of the Black arts movement in Boston that she helped establish. Through the CPA’s support, we ensure that future generations will have access to these invaluable records of creativity, resilience, and community building.

For more information about the project, please contact Giordana Mecagni at g.mecagni@northeastern.edu or 617-373-8318.

To learn more about what collections from Elma Lewis we hold, visit our research guide Finding Elma Lewis in the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.

This blog post was co-written by Giordana Mecagni, Head of Archives and Special Collections, and Molly Brown, Reference and Outreach Archivist.

Mellon Foundation Awards $350,000 Grant to Fund Plan for AI Book Training Commons

The Northeastern University Library and Authors Alliance have received a $350,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to plan a public-interest book training commons for artificial intelligence.

With the increasingly essential role that artificial intelligence plays in society, the importance of including information from books in AI’s large language models becomes more pivotal. The more than 129 million books written over the past 500 years are vital training data sources for AI, providing a quality, breadth, and diversity of content related to human thinking that can strengthen AI’s scope and accuracy.

The main goal of this project is to develop a plan for either establishing a new organization or identifying the relevant criteria for an existing organization (or organizations) to attempt the work of creating and stewarding a large-scale public interest training commons of books.

“We are grateful for the Mellon Foundation’s generous support for this important new project,” said Dean of the Library Dan Cohen. “We and the Authors Alliance are excited to convene writers, publishers, Librarians, technologists, and other stakeholders to explore the best way for books to be incorporated in an ethical and productive way that serves the public.”

Northeastern University Library’s role will be to support and coordinate the project and to host one of the two meetings of stakeholders.

With this work, planners hope to answer key questions, including:

  • What are the right goals and mission for such an effort, taking into account both the long and short-term;
  • What are the technical and logistical challenges that might differ from existing library-led efforts to provide access to collections as data;
  • How to develop a sufficiently large and diverse corpus to offer a reasonable alternative to existing sources;
  • What a public-interest governance structure should look like that takes into account the particular challenges of AI development;
  • How do we, as a collective of stakeholders from authors and publishers to students, scholars, and libraries, sustainably fund such a commons, including a model for long-term sustainability for maintenance, transformation, and growth of the corpus over time;
  • Which combination of legal pathways is acceptable to ensure books are lawfully acquired in a way that minimizes legal challenges;
  • How to respect the interests of authors and rightsholders by accounting for concerns about consent, credit, and compensation; and
  • How to distinguish between the different needs and responsibilities of nonprofit researchers, small market entrants, and large commercial actors.

The Authors Alliance is an organization focused on creating resources and opportunities for authors interested in sharing their work broadly, in the interest of the public good.

Research in the Archives: NERFC 2023-2024 Grant Applications Open

Archival photos, books, documents, and papers are spread around a round pink table. A hand on the left side of the frame points to one of the documents.
09/24/19 – BOSTON, MA. – A view of articles and photographs from Northeastern’s archive at Snell Library. Photo by Ruby Wallau/Northeastern University

Northeastern University’s Archives and Special Collections is proud to be a member of the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium (NERFC), which is a collaboration of 31 cultural institutions across New England.

The fellowship program’s aim is to promote research across a wide variety of institutions and regions in New England. NERFC grants at least two dozen awards every year. Fellows receive a stipend of $5,000 with the requirement that they conduct their research in at least three of the participating institutions for periods of two weeks each. The diverse group of institutions in NERFC offer research opportunities in collections that span the region’s time period, from pre–European contact to the present day. Past awards have funded research on a wide array of topics conducted by scholars and independent researchers from across the US.

As one of the participating institutions, we encourage you to apply to make use of our records documenting Boston’s history of social justice activism, neighborhoods and public infrastructure, as well as records from individuals and organizations part of the city’s African American, Asian American, LGBTQA, Latinx, and other communities and make connections between our records and other NERFC institutions’. 

Past NERFC fellows’ projects using Northeastern’s archival collections examined feminist health care centers, gay art and photography in 1970s Boston, links between socialist and feminist thought in Boston, and the history of Black intellectuals, to name a few. 

The Archives and Special Collections encourages researchers in the Northeastern community and beyond to apply to NERFC’s fellowship program by the February 1, 2023, deadline.

Have questions about how to get started? Email Reference and Outreach Archivist Molly Brown: mo.brown@northeastern.edu. 

To learn more about the application requirements and other participating institutions, please visit the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium website.

Mellon Foundation Awards $505,000 Grant to Extend Funding for the Boston Research Center

Boston Research Center logo

The Northeastern University Library has received a $505,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the final developmental phase of the Boston Research Center. This grant builds upon two previous grants from the Mellon Foundation — which helped Northeastern launch the BRC with a $200,000 planning grant in 2017, and a $650,000 implementation grant in 2019.

“We deeply appreciate the Mellon Foundation’s ongoing support of the Boston Research Center and our library’s efforts to work with the communities that surround Northeastern’s campuses,” said Dan Cohen, Dean of the Northeastern University Library. “Along with our partners in the Boston area, we have learned a great deal about how to express our neighbors’ stories, culture, and history.”

The BRC is dedicated to bringing Boston’s neighborhood and community histories to light through the creation and use of new technologies, allowing Boston residents to share underrepresented stories from city’s past. In its most recent phase, the BRC has focused on specific community projects to help share the stories of these neighborhoods and organizations. The Mellon Foundation’s grant will help develop tools and workflows to curate and disseminate these collections, making them accessible to the community and easy to build upon in future work.

By gathering documents, images, and personal narratives, and creating metadata for community resources, the BRC ensures that everything from public art and oral histories to important neighborhood sights are recorded to help disseminate area history and culture. Recent projects include:

  • The Harriet Tubman Memory House Project, which contains photographs, oral histories, flyers, architectural plans, and other digitized materials that tell the interwoven stories of Boston’s South End neighborhood, the United South End Settlements and Harriet Tubman House, gentrification, community action, and resilience.
  • The East Boston Memoir Project, which contains photographs, oral histories, newspapers, and other digitized materials that make available the history of East Boston.
  • The Neighborhood Public Art Project, which contains an interactive map documenting Boston’s rich and diverse history of public art.
  • The Chinatown Collections Project, which contains historical records documenting the people, organizations, and historical collections of Boston’s Chinatown in a bilingual database.

Located in Northeastern University Library, the BRC is managed by the Archives and Special Collections and the Digital Scholarship Group. It works in collaboration with the Boston Public Library along with many community organizations and individuals.

Northeastern University Library awarded Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant to study collaboration among decentralized research teams

The Northeastern University Library was recently awarded a $892,936 grant by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to study and develop effective practices for collaboration and communication by researchers distributed across multiple locations, as is increasingly the case in Northeastern’s expanding global campus network.

The grant will focus on Northeastern University’s “impact engines,” interdisciplinary teams that span two or more of Northeastern’s campuses and research locations throughout the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. It will fund two new library staff positions who will onboard and assist these research groups as they attempt to surmount the challenges associated with working together while physically distant.

The grant will also fund an independent project analyst who will collect data and survey information about the performance of the groups to determine which types of communication technologies and collaborative behaviors improved their work.

“Despite many researchers having to collaborate virtually over the past two years, we’re still figuring out hybrid and remote work on an ad hoc basis,” says Joshua Greenberg, director of the Sloan Foundation’s technology program. “We are excited to see what this focused investment in collaboration support for impact engines can reveal about the tools and best practices that best foster collaboration between staff on different campuses, and how those findings can be used to enable great research.”

The project will eventually produce:

  • A website containing detailed analysis on different communication techniques and collaborative models
  • Recommendations for setting up and supporting decentralized researchers
  • A formal peer-reviewed paper that provides details on the collected data and methodology
  • Multiple presentations of results at major conferences

“The Northeastern University Library is thrilled by how this grant will help us to synthesize research across our campuses, and grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for its generous support of this endeavor,” said Dan Cohen, Vice Provost for Information Collaboration and Dean of the Library. “We also expect this project to provide helpful advice to other research teams and universities who seek to support similar distributed work using new technology and staff roles.”

The importance of this project was made evident in recent years, when the COVID-19 pandemic created the need for colleagues to work collaboratively in a highly distributed state. By studying the best ways to navigate these hurdles using technology and library support staff, decentralized research teams will ideally become more cohesive and productively collaborative.