The Brooklyn Academy of Music has announced a four-year, $1 million grant from the Leon Levy Foundation to catalog and digitize materials from its Hamm Archives.

The grant will enable BAM to share selections from its unique archival holdings, which include a wide range of materials, from Civil War memorabilia to correspondence with some of the twentieth century's most iconic artists. Over the next four years, the institution will digitize key materials relating to BAM and the performing arts and develop the infrastructure to process new digital assets as they are created, design and build a searchable online portal at BAM.org, and host symposia for other performing arts archivists and interested peer organizations to learn from its experience. Scheduled to launch in the spring of 2015, the portal will be named the Leon Levy BAM Digital Archive in recognition of the gift.

"Not only will the Leon Levy BAM Digital Archive enable us to showcase BAM's amazing collection in a more far-reaching way than ever before," said BAM Hamm Archives director Sharon Lehner, "but it will also allow us to share our newfound expertise with a growing community of performing arts archives in the process of building their own digital collections, thereby making a meaningful contribution to this emerging field."