Color Film Emergency Project awarded an NEH Implementation Grant

Color Film Emergency Project awarded an NEH implementation grant

The SAH’s Color Film Emergency Project (CFEP) has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant of $340,000 to expand the work of identifying and processing select SAH members’ 35mm slide collections. The project, Addressing At-risk 35mm Architectural Slides Through a Consortium Work Model, is a collaboration between the SAH and the University of California, Riverside. The Grant PIs, Jackie Spafford and Sonja Sekely-Rowland, now joined by Maureen Burns, will be building on the work initiated through an NEH foundation grant in 2020-22.

We are grateful to the NEH for providing this opportunity to save significant curated image collections through description, digitization, and accessibility through SAHARA, while providing professional student training and the development of a creative and collaborative consortium model, sustainable for the future.  

The CFEP, conceived in 2012, emerged from the realization that numerous important 35mm slide collections from the 1960-90s are threatened with loss, destruction, and environmental damage. In addition to documenting noteworthy contemporary and historic architecture, the collections include cityscapes and landscapes, vernacular design, SAH study tours, and, critically, documentation of cultural heritage that is changing, and in some cases vanishing.  A list of criteria was developed to determine the suitability of slides, which include the level of organization and identification; the physical condition and storage quality; the photographic quality; and the significance of the content. The photographer/donors who participated in the 2020-22 phase were asked to identify subsets of manageable size to be processed. (Unfortunately, a lack of physical storage options in libraries and archives makes any commitment to wholesale acceptance of collections impossible.)

For this new grant phase, processing tasks will be completed through a consortium of partners at more than a dozen institutions across the US: archivists, visual resources professionals, librarians and faculty. For the next three years, these partners will take on collection subsets for a number of tasks which may include some, but not all, of the following: assessing, organizing, cataloging, digitizing, and ultimately publishing in SAHARA on JSTOR. A large portion of the grant ($135,000) is earmarked for undergraduate student internships and graduate student fellowships, which will provide valuable training and work experience, as well as compensation for their contributions to this major effort.

For more information, please contact:

Jackie Spafford, SAHARA Co-Editor: spafford@ucsb.edu

Sonja Sekely-Rowland, Visual Resources Curator, UC Riverside: Sonja.sekely@ucr.edu

Maureen Burns, IMAGinED Consulting: moaburns@gmail.com

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this announcement do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.