NORTON - Efforts to put such texts as the 19th century diaries of Wheaton College legend Eliza Wheaton online got a boost through a one-year $86,770 national planning grant.

The project's total cost is $140,449.

Wheaton, Mount Holyoke College and Dickinson (Pa.) College will share in the $53,678 the Institute of Museum and Library Services planning grant doesn't cover, said Scott Hamlin, Wheaton's director of LIS and academic tech support.

The three colleges wrote the grant toward creating "an online resource" of digitized texts kept by small liberal arts colleges nationwide, Hamlin said.

This new network means greater access to texts, some of which are hand written, being transcribed and in some cases translated by students and faculty as part of a class or research project, often related to professors' research interests, Hamlin saisd. "We're all producing these digital texts," he said.

"These are texts that have not been published before, or if they have, they've been out of print for a long time."

Hamlin hopes building of the new online network begins this winter.

First, Wheaton and its peers will survey small liberal arts colleges about their digitization efforts and needs, he said.

Librarians, technologists and teachers from various schools will meet to discuss their needs.

At least one consultant will be hired to help guide the schools.

Wheaton and other schools "have a little bit of a network already," having started working on this idea in 2003, Hamlin said.

"It's usually small pockets of activity that are doing this," he said.

Last fall, Wheaton and Rhodes (Tenn.) College co-sponsored another discussion here, involving eight schools, as well as representatives of the Brown University's Women Writers Project, he said.

The Women Writers Project describes itself as "a long-term research project devoted to early modern women's writing and electronic text encoding." Project officials have offered Wheaton and its peers guidance, Hamlin said.

"Larger institutions have been doing this for years," he said.

"A lot of the larger schools have the human resources and the financial resources to get programs like this off the ground.

Smaller universities and schools don't."

The grant was among $17.9 million in National Leadership Grants recently awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.