photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World photo

Dole Institute of Politics Nov. 11, 2021.

The Dole Institute of Politics at KU has launched a new project to digitize tens of thousands of records from the late Sen. Bob Dole for inclusion in a national congressional database that it is helping to create.

KU has been selected for the second phase of a project involving seven universities and institutions that are expanding the nascent American Congress Digital Archives Portal. In a project that is expected to take two years, the institute will contribute more than 12,000 pages of digital materials related to disability policy that Dole and his staff worked on during his long career. Additionally, the institute will digitize about 10,000 pages of Dole’s weekly schedules from 1972 to 1995. The institute also will begin work to catalog papers from Sen. Elizabeth Dole’s time in office.

The latest stage of this project has been funded by a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. West Virginia University is leading the project and is joined by institutions at the University of Oklahoma, University of Georgia and University of Hawaii, among other organizations.

The project is designed to address major hurdles that researchers often face when trying to access congressional records. Unlike presidential papers, which are centralized in one location, congressional collections are in many locations throughout the country. The digital portal, which has been operating as a prototype for the last two years, ultimately will allow researchers and other members of the public to access a large variety of documents remotely.