Washington University Libraries received a two-year grant from the Mellon Foundation to support an exploration of essential questions surrounding the acquisition, discoverability, preservation and use of born-digital poetry collections.
The $250,000 award will enable University Libraries to develop online resources and systems to process, preserve and steward the collections of a new generation of digital-native poets. Leading the project will be Nadia Ghasedi, associate university librarian for special collections, preservation and digital strategies; Joy Novak, head of Special Collections; Joel Minor, curator of the Modern Literature Collection, and Kelli West, a digital preservation specialist.
The project, “Born-Digital Poetry: Planning for the Future of Literary Archives,” will be centered in University Libraries’ Modern Literature Collection, which launched in 1964 as an archive for contemporary English and American poets and has grown to include materials of more than 175 authors, among them Mary Jo Bang, James Merrill and May Swenson. Read more on the University Libraries website.
