Walt Whitman Archive wins C.F.W. Coker Award

The Walt Whitman Archive Integrated Guide Team was awarded the C.F.W. Coker Award from the Society of American Archivists Aug. 4 in Washington, D.C. The Coker Award recognizes the archives' breakthrough integrated finding guide to Whitman's poetry manuscripts.

The project, co-directed by Katherine Walter and Kenneth M. Price of UNL, was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. "The guide pulls together manuscript information from over 30 institutions into one finding aid," said Price, professor of English and co-director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at UNL.

The C.F.W. Coker Award was established in 1984, to recognize "finding aids, finding aid systems, projects that involve innovative development in archival description, or descriptive tools that enable archivists to produce effective finding aids. To merit serious consideration for the award, nominees must, in some significant way, set national standards, represent a model for archival description, or otherwise have a substantial impact on descriptive practices."

"The Walt Whitman Archive is a multi-institutional team effort," said Walter, co-director of the center and professor of libraries at UNL. "This project shows how you can stretch the boundaries of international standards to create something entirely new that can benefit everyone. We were very fortunate to have a gifted and creative project team."

That team also included Mary Ellen Ducey, university archivist and special collections librarian at UNL, and Daniel Pitti of the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia.

The Whitman Archive can be found on-line at www.whitmanarchive.org

Contacts:Katherine Walter, Professor, University Libraries, (402) 472-3939; "Kenneth Price, Professor, English, (402) 472-0293