Papers of Abraham Lincoln receives grant to store digital images of
documents
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[September 09, 2013]
SPRINGFIELD -- The Abraham
Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum announced last week that
Amazon Web Services has awarded the Papers of Abraham Lincoln an
AWS in Education
grant of $24,000 in storage services. This will allow the Papers of
Abraham Lincoln to store more than 35 terabytes of master image
files in a secure environment.
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For the past decade, the staff of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln has
been collecting images of documents written by or to Abraham Lincoln
from repositories and private collections around the world. Thus
far, the project has scanned more than 90,000 documents from more
than 400 repositories and 180 private collections in 47 states and
five foreign countries. The archive will likely top 150,000
documents when complete. From 2006 to 2013, the National Center
for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign housed the growing archive of master image files.
The retirement of their mass storage system has forced the project
to look for a new storage solution for its 35 terabytes of files.
(Thirty-five terabytes is roughly equivalent to 10.8 million
photographs or a digital music file that would play nonstop for 68
years.)
"Congressman Randy Hultgren was instrumental in bringing to our
attention the AWS in Education grant program and putting us in touch
with the right people at AWS to discuss our urgent needs and go
through the application process," said Daniel Stowell, director of
the Papers of Abraham Lincoln.
"Preserving the papers of President Abraham Lincoln was a great
effort to be a part of," said Hultgren. "The tireless work to
archive the full life story of the president and his enormous impact
on society is to be commended. We are fortunate to have AWS play
such a significant role in storing these important records."
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Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services Inc. offers more than 30
cloud-computing services that power hundreds of thousands of
businesses and government programs in 190 countries.
"This grant from AWS is a great help to our project," Stowell
said. "It provides us with storage space for our image files at a
critical juncture in our efforts. It could not have come at a better
time. It also gives us time to develop a long-term storage
solution."
The Papers of
Abraham Lincoln is a long-term documentary editing project
dedicated to identifying, imaging, transcribing, annotating and
publishing all documents written by or to Abraham Lincoln during his
lifetime (1809-1865). The project is administered through the
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, and is co-sponsored
by the Center for State Policy and Leadership at the University of
Illinois Springfield and by the Abraham Lincoln Association.
[Text from
Abraham
Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum
file received from the
Illinois Historic
Preservation Agency]
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