Among the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recent announcement of $22.8 million in grants for 232 humanities projects in the second round of its grant awards this fiscal year was included funding provided to the Libraries as one of the recipients for the Texas Archival Resources Online’s (TARO) proposal the “Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO) to the 21st Century Collaborative Planning Project.”
The NEH will provide $35,204 in direct funding for a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Foundations grant to conduct strategic planning that will address researchers’ need for better intellectual access to TARO’s holdings. The Libraries, in partnership with the TARO Steering Committee and their respective institutions will use the funds to assist with the one-year collaborative planning, assessment and pilot testing project. The project will begin July 1, 2015.
TARO is a freely accessible platform for searching over 7,200 finding aids describing collections held by cultural heritage institutions in Texas. TARO has proven a rich resource for historians, documentarians, educators and students since its establishment in 1999, with participating institutions including the state’s larger repositories such as the Texas State Library and Archives, Texas A&M University, and Rice University, and smaller archives including the Old Jail Art Center and San Jacinto Museum of History, as well as over thirty other archives and libraries around the state.
In his announcement of the awards, NEH Chair William Adams said, “In the 50 years since NEH’s founding, the Endowment has supported excellence in the humanities by funding far-reaching research, preservation projects and public programs. The grants announced today continue that tradition, making valuable humanities collections, exhibitions, documentaries and educational resources available to communities across the country.”
According to Kelly Kerbow-Hudson, steering committee co-chair, “The award of the NEH planning grant is big news for TARO and its contributors — and it’s great news for the state’s archival researchers, as well.” She points out that the grant will provide the support necessary to plan for a significant update to the TARO online reference resource http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/index.html and create best practices to standardize existing finding aids.
The TARO Steering Committee — which includes representatives from repositories across the state — worked extensively to research for and prepare the grant proposal. Special thanks go to key contributors Amy Bowman of UT’s Briscoe Center for American History, Amanda Focke of Rice University’s Woodson Research Center, and Jennifer Hecker of UT Libraries. A special thanks, as well, to additional Libraries staff involved in the process: Donna Coates, Minnie Rangel, Linda Abbey, Dr. Fred Heath as Project Director and Dr. Lorraine Haricombe as Project Director moving forward.