The University of Virginia’s Miller Center has been awarded $355,000 by the Institute of Museum and Library Services toward the development of a website that will give users one centralized place to search across digital collections of presidential sites and libraries.

PresidentialCollections.org, which was launched as a test site last year, provides a place for people interested in presidential history to search for materials that are now vast and disparate. The funding will allow the Miller Center to increase the number of participating organizations as well as add more resources, including digitized microfilm collections, catalog materials and training resources.

Materials currently on the site include:
• diaries of John Adams and letters between him and his family
• letters by Woodrow Wilson
• letters to Theodore Roosevelt
• photos and film of John and Jacqueline Kennedy around the time of the assassination
• oral-history interviews of the administrations of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush

PresidentialCollections.org aims to make discovering these and others materials easier for a wide audience, including scholars, librarians, researchers, students and presidential history buffs. It also will increase exposure for the collections of presidential sites and libraries.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums.

The IMLS grant will be administered by the Miller Center’s Scripps Library, which serves as a research facility for scholars of American history, public policy and the presidency. The library's print collection includes complete sets of presidential papers, memoirs and biographies of presidents and administration officials and other reference sources. Its multimedia archive includes more than 2,500 hours of secret White House tape recordings, hundreds of presidential oral-history interviews, audio and video recordings of thousands of Miller Center events, and documents related to the executive branch of American government.