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A grant to digitize some 1,000 original documents and visual images relating to Native Americans of the Southeastern United States will revolutionize access to the vulnerable materials, increasing usage by everyone from scholars to school children.

The project, while limited by geography and time period, is of national significance, said Bob Henneberger of the University of Georgia Libraries, who will head the project.

"The importance of native tribes in the early history of America has been universally acknowledged, but primary sources remain scarce, especially for students below the college level and for the general public," Henneberger said. "The documents selected for this project serve to communicate to the modern reader how Native Americans viewed the European settlers as fellow human beings, both positively and negatively, from the first contacts to the point when they were forcibly removed from their lands."

The $330,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services goes to the University of Georgia, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville Libraries, the Frank H. McClung Museum and the Tennessee State Library and Archives. The selected documents represent the most significant holdings from each collection and range in date from the mid-18th century to 1842.

Although the primary focus of these collections is the Cherokee tribe, other tribes are represented, such as the Seminole and the Creek. The documents include treaties, letters from tribal members, letters to the tribes from state representatives, military orders regarding Native Americans and the first 18 months of the first newspaper published in a Native American language, the Cherokee Phoenix.

"Original manuscript material of this type and from this time period generally exists only in paper form, buried within vaults and closed stacks, available only to the persistent researcher," Henneberger said. "Digitization of these materials will provide Web access to a substantially larger audience, including many groups which have never before had opportunities to use these documents, or even have known of their existence."

The documents and images will be mounted on GALILEO, a web-based database server sponsored by the University System of Georgia Board of Regents and available in academic, public and school libraries throughout Georgia.

"Individually, most documents are relatively brief, from one to ten pages in length, but collectively they form a rich corpus capable of supporting any level of research or educational outreach," Henneberger said. "The greatest wealth and significance of these documents extends beyond traditional political and diplomatic history into the daily lives of Native Americans and their new European neighbors. The documents in these collections testify to the richness and continued viability of Native American culture even as it was encroached upon and eroded by European settlement. Letters of complaint to white government officials from Native Americans demonstrate their ability to contend with and manipulate European institutions with a resourcefulness that belies the common stereotypes of 'Indians' as violent savages or helpless victims."

Part of the project will be to establish the best practices and methods of scanning and converting materials to digital form. A guide will be produced which can be used by other libraries and museums. The University of Georgia Libraries have already made significant progress toward improving access to special collections through digitization. Ongoing projects will digitize image collections, manuscripts from early Georgia, Georgia newspapers and the 100 most important books in Georgia history and culture.

The most popular collection featured on the University of Georgia Libraries web site is the rare map collection, which averages more than 40,000 hits per week.

"Our prediction is that 'Southeastern Native American Documents, 1763-1842' will have at least as great an impact as our rare map collection," Henneberger said.