Maintained by pioweb@ucsc.edu
© 2008 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

September 18, 2007

UCSC partners with Heinlein Prize Trust to make archive of renowned science fiction author available online

By Scott Rappaport (831) 459-2496; srapp@ucsc.edu

The complete archive of renowned American author Robert Heinlein will be made available online, thanks to an unusual partnership between the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Heinlein Prize Trust.

The entire contents of the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Archive--housed in the UC Santa Cruz Library's Special Collections since 1968--have been scanned in an effort to preserve the contents digitally while making the collection easily available to both academics and the general public.

"It turned out to be over half a million items scanned," noted Christine Bunting, head of Special Collections at UCSC, who coordinated the project at McHenry Library.

The groundbreaking new online resource was officially launched to the public in July at the Heinlein Centennial celebration held in Kansas City, Missouri. The first collection released includes 106,000 pages, consisting of Heinlein's complete manuscripts--including files of all his published works, notes, research, early drafts and edits of manuscripts. These documents offer a window into Heinlein's creative process and provide background and context for his work.

Other collections soon to be added to the online archive will feature Robert and Virginia Heinlein's business and personal correspondence, scrapbooks, photo albums, and unpublished works, including communications with Heinlein's editor and agent.

The Heinlein digitization project was the brainchild of Art Dula, director of the Heinlein Prize Trust. Fees for receiving documents are approximately one cent per page, and academic users can apply for a research grant to receive documents free of charge. A percentage of the fees earned will go back to UCSC to support maintenance of the archive at Special Collections.

"It's a very unusual arrangement," noted Bunting. "We're working with an outside organization that holds the copyright, and they've set up an online pay-for-view system that returns a portion of the proceeds to the Library. They're making everything available at a very reasonable rate, and it's mutually beneficial," she added.

The Heinleins spent two decades living in Santa Cruz and some of the author's best known literary works were written in the study of his home in Bonny Doon. In 1966, Heinlein said in a letter to UCSC's first university librarian that he and his wife "have bought land in Bonny Doon and are preparing to build. The presence of the University was a major factor in our selection of Santa Cruz." In 1967, Heinlein became one of the first "Friends of the Library" for McHenry Library on the newly built UCSC campus.

One of the grandmasters of science fiction along with such colleagues as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, Heinlein produced more than 50 novels and collections of short stories over his long career. He became a pop icon in the 1960s with the publication of Stranger in A Strange Land, one of the most successful science fiction novels ever published. He is also the author of Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and The Puppet Masters.

"One of our goals has always been to make Heinlein's material more available to the academic community," noted Bunting. "He's an extremely popular writer, but we'd like to attract more scholarly attention to his work. Heinlein was as much a scientist as a literary figure, and was tremendously influential in his time."

________

To access the Heinlein archive online, go to: Heinlein online archive

#####