(Philadelphia, PA, May 6, 2026) The Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries, Inc. (PACSCL) awarded prizes to honor its late Chair, Will Noel, in recognition of achievements in open access, a focus of Noel’s work.
Dr. William G. Noel died in Edinburgh, Scotland on April 10, 2024 while on an acquisitions trip. Prior to his untimely death, Noel was the Associate Librarian for Special Collections at Princeton University. He served on PACSCL’s Board of Directors from 2015 – 2022 and was Chair of the Board from 2019 – 2022.
PACSCL’s Technology Sustainability Committee created the Noel Prize in 2025 with the specific intent of showcasing open access projects in the larger special collections community as both a memorial to Noel’s work and an acknowledgement of Noel’s wicked sense of humor. The top prize includes a small cash award, a commemorative popcorn bucket, and sets of novelty socks labeled with the word “Awesome,” one of Noel’s favorite words.
The grand prize winner was the German Society of Pennsylvania for their Historic German-American Manuscripts Transcription Project. Per the nomination, this project focuses on records and documents handwritten in “Kurrentschrift, a script that has not been taught routinely in Germany or anywhere else for almost a century. Few people in the United States or in Germany can read it. Learning Kurrentschrift takes time and only one or two specialized centers in the US teach it. For this reason, the rich holdings of GSP’s Horner Library archives have been inaccessible to most readers for many decades. To remedy this situation, the GSP Library Committee’s Maria Sturm and Horner librarian Bettina Hess launched this major transcription project. Since December 2019, the Horner Library has transcribed thousands of pages from the old handwriting to digital typescript through the efforts of a dozen volunteers from around the US and Germany who meet online weekly to teach themselves the old script and decipher record books, letter books, diaries and other documents in the Horner archives.”
The Prize Committee agreed that this multi-national transcription project fulfills the ideals of this prize: an open access project, of high value to its audiences and stakeholder communities, and that is significant relative to the size of the institution that undertook it. In particular, the Committee was impressed with the community-building around this project, which nurtures the enthusiasm of many volunteers, and keeps them connected both to each other and to the wonder of primary sources. The importance of maintaining open access was well stated in the nomination, which noted the challenges posed by script that is no longer used.
The Prize Committee agreed that Will Noel would have been pleased to see such a robust community of archives, libraries, and other cultural heritage stewards dedicated to open access. Three runner-up awards were granted as well. The Committee celebrated Gratz College’s ambitious The Grayzel Digital Platform; appreciated the timeliness of Lafayette College’s project digitizing the Hubbard Collection of Letters from the Marquis de Lafayette to George Washington; and wished to honor the scrappiness of the Penn Museum for Penn Museum Archives Digitization: Systematic Scanning Phase One, a project that prioritizes efficiency over perfection in making scans available as soon as possible (as per this example finding aid.)
The next cycle for the Noel Prize begins in January, with applications due on March 15, 2027 and awards to be announced at the PACSCL Annual General Meeting on May 5, 2027. For more information, go to: https://pacscl.org/what-we-do/for-librarians/the-noel-prize
Here is a complete list of honorees:
Winner
Historic German-American Manuscripts Transcription Project of the German Society of Pennsylvania
Runners- Up
The Grayzel Digital Platform of Gratz College.
Hubbard Collection of Letters from the Marquis de Lafayette to George Washington of Lafayette College
Penn Museum Archives Digitization: Systematic Scanning Phase One of Penn Museum
Honorable Mention
Common History by Bill Kramer
NJ250: Living Documents, Evolving Rights of the New Jersey State Library and the New Jersey State Archives
Rosenbach Museum & Library catalog modernization project
The Stanhope Johnson Office Records project of the Jones Memorial Library