​The following is a list of Catalyst Fund award recipients, the amount awarded and the project name. Five Project proposals (to be implemented by the applying institution) were funded. The Catalyst Fund was created to directly fund projects by member institutions that are designed to benefit the entire community of archives, libraries and museums. These projects were carefully reviewed and chosen based on their potential for scalability and maximum impact on all collections-holding institutions. Only LYRASIS members are eligible to apply for the Catalyst Fund.

University of Utah – Toolkit to Assess OCR’ed Historical Text in the Era of Big Data.
$30,100

While cultural heritage institutions have been using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract full text from scanned page images, the quality of extracted text is low for historical texts. In this era of big data, such historical texts will be left behind, both in search rankings and their use through computational tools. We propose developing a set of guidelines, and tools that will assist organizations in improving their existing OCRed collections.
University of Mississippi – Caption This: Creating Efficiency in Audiovisual Accessibility Using Artificial Intelligence.
$28,198

This project will focus on the creation of a successful workflow to use open source code to efficiently produce captions for the native streaming audio and video files in our institutional repository, thereby making A/V materials accessible to all users, in accordance with the University’s accessibility standards.
University of Connecticut – Unlocking the Past: Handwritten Text Recognition for 19th Century Manuscripts.
$24,277

To develop a foundation for a large-scale, open source software for handwriting recognition for historical documents.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – Preprint Accessibility: Is Early Access to Research Access for All?
$6,037

To investigate the accessibility of preprint server platforms and files in order to identify accessibility issues and suggest possible remedies
New Jersey State Library – Increasing Staff Confidence to Implement User Experience and Design Principles in Website Creation.
$18,250

This project will develop a robust online version of its User Experience (UX) Boot Camp and make it available at no cost to attendees. The course is designed to equip participants with the skills to create vibrant and appealing websites that serve the needs of the public. While the Boot Camp is marketed to public librarians, the curriculum is largely applicable to all members of the LYRASIS community who have any responsibility for a public-facing website.
Become a Reviewer​