Current Projects
The William G. Noel Eureka Fund Grant Committee is proud to announce its inaugural Spring 2026 awards to the following institutions and projects:
- Lehigh University, $4,940, to fund the project “Making Hidden Text & Image Findable: Developing Standards for the Description, Discovery, and Preservation of Multispectral Manuscript Data.” This project is intended to build on previous work developing a functional open-source Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) tool by using commercially available Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract texts to produce AI-generated transcriptions for human validation and correction leading to searchable PDF documents suitable for discovery and access.
- Ohio University, $4,991, to fund a project to digitize and describe Qur’an manuscripts in an effort to expand the source base for teaching while increasing representation of belief systems within the manuscript materials and broader rare book collection
- Columbia University, $4,968, to fund the project “Metadata Creation for Uncatalogued Muslim World Manuscripts.” This project will recruit two graduate students with language expertise to create preliminary metadata for a number of undescribed Islamicate manuscripts.
- University of Pennsylvania, $5,000, to fund the project “Cataloging Newly Acquired Indic Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania.” This project is intended to hire an outside cataloger to describe additional materials acquired for the Indic manuscripts collection since 2016, increasing access to objects that reflect a greater emphasis on modern vernacular languages from a wider geographic scope and a range of support materials.