On December 17, 2008, Penn Libraries received notification on behalf of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) that the Council on Library and Information Resources had awarded PACSCL a $500,000 grant to support the project "Hidden Collections in the Philadelphia Area: A Consortial Processing and Cataloging Initiative."

Penn Libraries will host the consortial project, which is expected to last for twenty-seven months beginning May 2009. The project builds on an earlier Mellon-funded PACSCL project focused on undertaking a broad inventory of archival holdings of participating PACSCL institutions.

The goals of the project are to process and create encoded archival description (EAD) finding aids and MARC records for 114 collections, and upgrade substandard descriptive tools to EAD finding aids for 82 additional collections.

In addition to hosting and administering the project team of two full-time professional archivists and a number of graduate and undergraduate students, Penn Libraries will receive $24,000 to assist in the development of a PACSCL EAD repository from which the Penn Libraries, Archives and Museum will eventually benefit.

For more information:
David McKnight