This spring Northern Illinois University Libraries seek support for two programs.
The first will move the libraries' Children's Collection to the first floor of Founders Memorial Library and purchase shelving, furniture, and other items to make the collection available to children and allow researchers to study its use. This program seeks $10,000. The Friends of NIU Libraries will provide a match of $350 for every $1000 raised.
The second program will digitize two sets of materials from the libraries' Special Collections and Archives Unit. NIU Libraries' popular culture collections receive heavy use, especially late nineteenth-century dime novels and juvenile series books.
The first portion of this program will digitize volumes of one of these publications and make them available to scholars and fans in an online format. The New York Family Story Paper was one of the most widely-circulated weeklies published at the end of the 19th century. Authors such as Laura Jean Libbey and Nellie Bly dominated its pages for over thirty years, contributing hundreds of stories, some out of print now for over a century, that challenged the conventions of earlier sentimental fiction by rejecting passive heroines in favor of canny working-girls and society women who experienced their own desires and were more proactive in the defense of their lives. NIU holds 947 issues. Each $1,000 raised will allow the Libraries to digitize, preserve, and make accessible 75 issues.
The other project will digitize 50 serializations, short stories, and poems by Horatio Alger, making them available online as they originally appeared to the American reading public: in story papers and magazines. These will join other works by Alger from Good News and Street & Smith’s New York Weekly that are already in NIU’s Nickels and Dimes, a collection of over 13,000 digitized dime novels and story papers. This project seeks to raise $795. The Horatio Alger Society will match the first $395 raised for this project dollar-for-dollar.
