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 eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century dime novels.
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 an eight-page weekly that ran for 2,498 issues between 1873 and 1921. Authors publishing in this paper challenged the conventions of earlier sentimental and domestic fiction by rejecting passive heroines in favor of canny working-girls who were more proactive in the defense of their lives and virtue. Because it mostly featured stories about women, a subject of little interest to early dime novel collectors, it has received less attention than other series. This work will make issues of The New York Family Story Paper available online. NIU holds 947 issues. Each $1,000 raised will allow the Libraries to digitize, preserve, and make accessible 75 issues.
The other portion of the popular culture project will migrate the Horatio Alger Digital Repository from its existing platform to the Northern Illinois University Digital Library (NIUDL), which contains the remainder of the library's digital collections. This will require the re-digitization of approximately 50 periodicals, allowing these titles to function in the NIUDL environment. Horatio Alger is best known for his “rags-to-riches” novels about impoverished boys and their rise to middle-class security through hard work. This project seeks to make available Alger’s work as it originally appeared to the American reading public: in story papers and magazines. If funded, we will digitize 50 periodicals featuring serializations, short stories, and poems by Horatio Alger. NIU became the official repository of the Horatio Alger Society in 1994.The Society will match the first $395 raised for this project dollar-for-dollar.
