When nonfiction writers, historians and community researchers look for primary sources, the digital stacks are often richer than they were a decade ago — but many vital archives remain difficult to reach, stored in boxes, on obsolete audiovisual formats, or under access conditions that limit who can see them. This month’s round of grants from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) aims to change that by funding a wide-ranging set of projects that will convert fragile or little-known collections into accessible digital resources.
On October 27, 2026, CLIR announced roughly $4 million in awards to 17 projects through its Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices program. The funded efforts span academic libraries, independent cultural organizations and community archives across the United States and Canada, and the materials targeted for digitization are strikingly diverse: rare Tibetan woodblock prints (pechas), home-movie footage of midcentury Black Chicago life, the institutional records of grassroots arts organizations, regional LGBTQ+ newspapers and thousands of images, recordings and ephemeral items that document local and family histories.
The grants are built around two overlapping goals: preservation and broader, community-centered access. Recipients will not only create high-resolution digital surrogates; many projects include transcription, captioning, better descriptive metadata, and outreach plans so that descendants, artists, researchers and journalists can discover and use the material without traveling or requesting special permission.
Examples that matter for writers and researchers
The University of Toronto’s Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library received support to digitize the Lobsang P. Lhalungpa pecha collection — dozens of wrapped woodblock volumes, some items dating to the 15th century — with the stated aim of making the materials available through an open-access platform designed for community use.
In the literary and arts world, Cave Canem, the national organization that supports Black poets, won funding to digitize audio and audiovisual recordings, chapbooks, photographs and ephemeral materials that document its history and fellows. For scholars of performance and material culture, Arts + Public Life at the University of Chicago will digitize the Ramon Williams home-movie collection — hundreds of reels showing mid-20th-century Black public life on Chicago’s South Side — making raw visual sources that often drive new nonfiction narratives widely available online.
Washington University Libraries in St. Louis is using its award to digitize more than 100 linear feet of local LGBTQ+ holdings — newsletters, organizational records, posters and audiovisual items — alongside community-centered programming that aims to help people use and steward their own personal collections.
Why this matters for nonfiction work
Primary sources drive new nonfiction projects by offering evidence that can reshape familiar narratives. Digitization reduces the cost and logistical barriers that once confined research to a handful of reading rooms, and the projects supported by CLIR emphasize equitable and ethical access: many proposals include advisory boards composed of community members, plans for culturally responsive metadata, and workflows for returning digital copies to originating communities.
That doesn’t mean digital access replaces in-person engagement or the labor of community custodianship. Instead, these grants aim to extend stewardship: community groups and small cultural organizations often lack the technical infrastructure or funding to digitize vulnerable materials; regranting programs like CLIR’s provide not only equipment and vendor support but also training, cataloguing help and preservation planning that can leave a lasting local capacity.
Program context and scale
Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices was established in 2021 and is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. CLIR’s announcement notes that this cohort brings the program’s cumulative investment to a scale that has already reshaped what’s discoverable in digital archives.
For readers and writers of nonfiction — from biography and literary history to cultural reportage and documentary projects — the practical effect will come in two forms: more primary-source material available online, and better quality metadata and transcripts that make searching, quoting and contextualizing sources faster and more reliable. For communities whose histories have been underdocumented or hard to reach, the projects promise greater visibility and tools to help tell stories on their own terms.
What to watch next
- Several projects are already scheduled to begin within the next year; delivery timelines, web platforms and the scope of transcription/captioning differ by project. Grant recipients are building web portals, partnering with community advisors, and planning public programs to introduce the digitized holdings to new audiences.
- Expect new research outputs: once raw archival material is easier to find, historians, journalists and authors commonly produce articles, essays, exhibitions and books that reinterpret the historical record.
- Ethical and practical questions will persist — for example, how to balance open access with cultural protocols or privacy concerns — but the funded projects explicitly incorporate community oversight and preservation workflows designed to address those trade-offs.
For writers pursuing projects that depend on previously hidden primary sources, the CLIR-funded cohort is a timely reminder that the archival landscape is changing. Through community-focused digitization, materials once accessible to only a few specialists can become raw material for a broader public conversation — and for new nonfiction that centers the voices those archives represent.
Reporting note: This article is based on grant announcements and recipient statements published by the Council on Library and Information Resources and by the recipient institutions. Where available, institutional postings supplied project descriptions and start dates.
