VIRGINIA HISTORICAL DATABASE BECOMES AVAILABLE

The Virginia Heritage Project, a collaborative effort of the University of Virginia, Old Dominion University Libraries and the Virtual Library of Virginia, has integrated the state's archival collections and historical resources making them available through the Internet.

The Heritage project was funded primarily by a $250,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Old Dominion University Libraries have participated in the project since its inception and have provided support including writing the NEH grant and developing finding aids associated with the union database.

The Heritage Project started with the goal of making many of the nations priceless historical, literary and political documents currently housed in special collections of Virginia's colleges, universities, and other research libraries more available to the people. Information which will be freely available on the Internet to scholars, students, and ordinary citizens include documents from the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 through the Revolutionary and Civil Wars into the tumult of the 20th century.

Eight months into the project, workers neared the mid-way point in the production stage of the grant and had encoded 7,800 pages out of 17,500. There are currently over 1600 encoded guides available and work continues steadily to complete the project.

To visit the Virginia Heritage Project and search the database, go to http://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaead/cgi-bin/eadform.pl.