WORCESTER – Every week, a digital archive of transgender history housed in a small room in Fenwick Hall at College of the Holy Cross grows a little bit more.

Sometimes the addition may be an obscure newsletter or article shared by one of the project’s dozens of collaborators, which include universities, nonprofits, and other groups. Other days, the archive’s administrator, assistant English professor K.J. Rawson, will get something even rarer.

On a Tuesday afternoon, for instance, he pulls out a manila envelope containing photos of World War II soldiers cross-dressing. Their owner, who had attended a recent talk by Mr. Rawson, simply told him to “find a good home for them,” he said.

“I didn’t set out to be an intermediary like that,” he said, adding that he works with the archive’s partner organizations to find takers for the actual physical materials he receives from donors. “But I’m happy to preserve transgender history that otherwise might have been lost.”

Mr. Rawson’s actual intention is to create the world’s first comprehensive digital database of transgender history. After starting the initiative at Holy Cross two years ago with an $80,000 grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, Mr. Rawson and his team of Holy Cross students received good news this week: They have been selected by the ACLS again to receive a digital extension grant for their project, this time for $150,000.

The additional funding, which the archive must spend during the fiscal year starting July 1, will not only allow the team to purchase a new computer and a better scanner as well as hire outside companies to help digitize its expanding collection, but also add a project coordinator and bring on six additional student researchers to join the 15 already working under Mr. Rawson.

“It’s a big grab for us,” he said. “I applied for (the extension grant) last year and didn’t get it. I’m so excited.”

Mr. Rawson’s goal is to more than double the size of the archive over the next year, from its current 2,000 digitized materials to 5,000. All of those pieces, which include oral histories, personal papers, organizational records, and photographs, will be available to the public, as the current database is now, on the project’s website, www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net. According to Mr. Rawson, more than 3,000 unique visitors go to the site each month, lingering there for an average of six minutes. “What that shows us is people are spending a lot of time on the site,” he said.

“I’ve had contact with people around the world” who have accessed the database, Mr. Rawson added, including in countries where identifying as transgender can be dangerous. “They’re finding a little bit of relief in the (archive).”

While the premise of the initiative has always been that transgender history, which has often been forced by societies and in many cases laws as well to stay hidden, needs to be documented and shared, that mission has taken on a more urgent tone in the last year, said Mithra Salmassi, a Holy Cross sophomore from Worcester who works as a research assistant at the archive. Immediately after the election in November of President Donald Trump, who has already validated some transgender activists’ fears by rolling back the previous administration’s guidance on ensuring protections for transgender students, “we (the archive staff and volunteers) agreed the work we were doing was more important than ever,” she said.

While the Catholic church, too, has generally been in opposition to the idea of transgender identity, Mr. Rawson said Holy Cross has “been nothing but supportive of the project,” however, “both the administration and the community as a whole.” He said he sees the archive fitting squarely within the college’s Jesuit mission, which includes “protecting the poor and powerless,” and said the initiative’s purpose is ultimately one rooted in education.

“As a whole, the project really does seek to increase understanding of transgender communities,” he said.

In a statement provided by Holy Cross, Margaret Freije, vice president of academic affairs and dean of the college, said: “Given our mission as a Jesuit undergraduate college and our commitments to scholarly excellence and engagement with the world, it seems particularly appropriate that this work will allow our undergraduates to pursue original scholarship in digital humanities and will allow them to engage with a community that historically has been marginalized and excluded.”

According to Cristal Steuer, a spokeswoman for the college, Holy Cross recognizes transgender identity in its housing policy, which stipulates the different genders be separate but allows for “assigning housing consistent with gender identity.”

While the ACLS did not comment specifically on why it chose to award one of its five extension grants to the transgender archive, the organization said this year’s crop of award recipients, in general, provides “compelling reminders of the power of the digital current in the humanities.”

The extension grant program, which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, received 80 applications in total, from which a panel of scholars chose the five award winners.

Mr. Rawson said he plans to apply again next year to the ACLS for the same grant, as well as pursue other funding for the project. For now, he said, his main mission is to "keep building."