The University of Chicago has announced that it has been granted nearly $1 million by the National Endowment for the Humanities to renovate the way digital collections and research data are created, managed and distributed.

According to the University of Chicago Library, university’s library and humanities division is going to collaborate to establish a new digital structure called UChicagoNode. This will be the foundation for a network aimed at improving digital research efforts at the university and beyond. This full version will require an additional $4 million in funding that the university plans to secure.

“Currently, material held by libraries across the world is effectively inaccessible because it cannot be easily discovered and accessed. At the same time, many fascinating outputs of scholarship on the web are at risk of being lost,” University Librarian and Dean Torsten Reimer said, according to the library's website. “The University of Chicago Library is committed to opening its collections, to ensure persistent and open access to scholarship and to contribute to a global knowledge environment that is open, accessible and equitable."

The goal of UChicagoNode is to unify more than 200 digital collections from various unconnected systems across the university. This includes digital content at the library. It also will offer researchers a one-stop shop to access available digital collections through an open-access platform, along with serving as a permanent repository for content created by the university and contributed for external partners, and also digitized by the library.

Scholars studying the history of housing in the South Side of the city can access resources easily once the infrastructure is completed. This includes videos from the Guerilla TV project on the demolition of Cabrini Green, digitalized documents from the Ida B. Wells archival collection on the Chicago Housing Authority’s Ida B. Wells Homes, and other resources. Researchers will be able to create data layers visualizing urban change based on research by utilizing the resources.

“The UChicagoNode project will build on the Division’s strengths by better integrating existing infrastructures that will help drive our ambitious agenda in research and teaching," Anne Robertson, dean of the Division of the Humanities, told the University of Chicago Library website. "It also builds on the longstanding partnership with the University of Chicago Library, which already provides content, expertise in metadata and preservation, and even hosting for some of our projects.”