The Oregon Wine History Archive (OWHA) at Linfield College will expand access to its collection after receiving a $6,130 grant from the Oregon Cultural Trust.
Linfield College is among 84 recipients of Cultural Development Grants from the Oregon Cultural Trust. The funds to Linfield will support the digitization of and access to interviews of contributors to Oregon’s wine industry, including new material from the Janis Miglavs and Oregon Pinot Camp Collections. The grant will be used to purchase hardware and software to aid in digital migration, long-term storage and interview editing, and hire and train student interns to aid the Linfield archives staff in preservation of the digital materials.
Miglavs is a world-renowned chronicler of Oregon wine through photography and videography and author of “Oregon: the Taste of Wine.” The Oregon Pinot Camp is an annual summer seminar held in the Willamette Valley for 50 of the top winemakers in Oregon. Each collection includes interviews with early Oregon wine pioneers David Lett (Eyrie Vineyards) and Richard Sommer (HillCrest Vineyard), now both deceased. The project will take interviews of Lett, Sommer and 50 others from across Oregon, preserve them in digital format, edit them, and make them available to the public via Linfield’s digital repository.
“By preserving stories of the Oregon wine industry, we preserve an important piece of Oregon heritage,” said Rachael Woody, Linfield College archivist. “This grant will allow us to move forward on making 158 interviews available online.”
Linfield’s Nicholson Library is home to the OWHA, established in 2011, which documents all aspects and regions of this industry in Oregon, and collects and preserves historical materials from winery owners, growers, researchers, marketers and sellers. OWHA houses irreplaceable photographs, maps, oral histories, wine labels, magazines, newspapers, letters and bottles of wine, among other items, and spans the early days of the industry to the present. Significant portions of the collection have been cataloged and uploaded to DigitalCommons@Linfield.
Statewide cultural organizations will receive a record $2.6 million in grants from the Oregon Cultural Trust in 2015-16, up 30 percent over last year and surpassing $2 million for the first time. The dramatic increase in funding results from a record fundraising year and a new distribution formula approved by the Oregon legislature.
The awards include a total of $644,959 to the Cultural Trust’s five statewide partners (Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon Heritage Commission, Oregon Humanities, Oregon Historical Society and the State Historic Preservation Office); $644,959 to 45 county and tribal cultural coalitions (who re-grant the funds through local programs); and $1,260,945 to 84 cultural organizations through competitive Cultural Development Grants, more than double the amount awarded last fiscal year. The Cultural Development Grants include first-time awards to 25 organizations and the largest grants ever awarded –$35,000 – to six of the state’s largest cultural nonprofits. The grants are awarded for projects that address access, capacity, creativity and preservation.
