We are delighted to announce that the Wallace Correspondence Project recently received a substantial grant from the Alfred Russel Wallace Centenary Celebration, directed by Richard Milner, a project which is funded by the John Templeton Foundation, USA (note that a slideshow of the Wallace Centenary Celebration's recent all-day event at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, featuring a lecture by Sir David Attenborough, can be seen HERE). The grant includes money to run the WCP for an additional year ($94,491 US = c. £56,557 GBP), and also funds to pay for 0.5 days per week of the Director's time ($7,484 US = £4,480 GBP per year) for two years after this - thus ensuring the project won't stop if no additional money can be secured.
The WCP's current funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will end in mid May 2014, at which point the new funding will kick in. It will pay the salary of the project's Archivist, Ruth Benny, plus many other costs. The main things that the project aims to achieve during this year (which will be the 4th year of the project) are: the addition of c. 100 letters and several notebooks to Wallace Letters Online (WLO); the transcription of around 500 letters; and the addition of a biographical feature to WLO which will enable users to look up information about the more than 1500 people who are known to have corresponded with Wallace. Lots of other work will also be done - such as tracking down new letters, tracing copyright holders etc.
Now all we need is to find about £850,000 GBP to complete the entire project!
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