The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a grant of $300,000 to the Shelley-Godwin Archive.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a grant of $300,000 to the Shelley-Godwin Archive, a digital resource comprising works of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Humanities scholars, curators, and information scientists from The New York Public Library (NYPL), the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford, the Houghton Library of Harvard University, the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, and the British Library will collaborate on the archive's creation. They will be led by Elizabeth C. Denlinger, Curator of the Pforzheimer Collection of the NYPL. Neil Fraistat, director of MITH, a renowned scholar in both the digital humanities and Shelley studies, will act as co-Principal Investigator.

The Shelley-Godwin Archive will draw primarily from the two foremost collections of these materials, those of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at NYPL, which together hold an estimated 90 percent of all known relevant manuscripts worldwide. With the Archive’s creation, manuscripts and early editions of these writers will be made freely available to the public through an innovative framework constituting a new model of best practice for research libraries. First among these is the manuscript of Mary Shelley's iconic novel of 1818, Frankenstein; and second will be the working notebooks of P.B. Shelley, which are scattered amongst the five partner institutions from California to England. MITH will create the project’s infrastructure with the assistance of the New York Public Library’s digital humanities group, NYPL Labs.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

The Council on Library and Information Resources and the Digital Library Federation have been awarded a Mellon grant to develop a Digital Public Library of America Prototype.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded CLIR/DLF a $46,000 planning grant to develop a prototype for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The prototype will be submitted to the DPLA “beta sprint,” which seeks “ideas, models, prototypes, technical tools, [or] user interfaces . . . that demonstrate how the DPLA might index and provide access to a wide range of broadly distributed content.”

Rachel Frick, director of the DLF program, will manage the project and serve as co-principal investigator with Carole Palmer, professor and director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

Palmer will lead UIUC staff in developing the prototype, which will demonstrate how the IMLS Digital Collections and Content Registry (DCC) and its research and development activities can serve the DPLA as a critical mass of base content, as well as an aggregation model. A functional prototype will be produced in combination with a set of static wireframes and demonstrations, showing how DCC’s advances in content, metadata, user experience, and infrastructure can be leveraged for the DPLA.

Palmer and Frick will work closely with Geneva Henry, executive director of the Center for Digital Scholarship at Rice University, who will produce a report that reviews current literature pertaining to the technical aspects of large-scale collection aggregations and federations. The report will review and compare the system architectures, content types, and scale of content of the DCC, Europeana, the National Science Digital Library, and other aggregations to shed light on how and why large-scale aggregation projects succeed or fail. The report will also identify potential content providers for the DPLA, and will estimate the time, effort, and other costs required to ingest these resources into the prototype.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has awarded 14 Sparks! Ignition Grants.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) announced today 14 awards totaling $336,281 matched with $360,444 of non-federal funds for Sparks! Ignition Grants. IMLS received 106 applications requesting $2,468,234 in funds.

"I am delighted to announce the first-ever Sparks! Ignition Grants, designed to help libraries and museums solve challenging problems," said Susan Hildreth, IMLS Director. "These awards speak to the great ingenuity and creativity of libraries and museums and we look forward to sharing their lessons learned."

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The Institute of Museum and Library Services has issued the "IMLS FY2011 Appropriations Allocation."

Here's the announcement:

In allocating the FY 11 appropriation, we have carefully reviewed our strategic priorities and our activities that have the greatest impact. IMLS supports a diverse portfolio of programs to meet the IMLS mission and bring high-quality library and museum services to the broadest possible public. In making these allocations IMLS balanced interests in supporting "what works" and also investing in "what's new" through innovation and research. In this way IMLS provides the leadership to help libraries and museums evolve their services to meet the public’s ever-changing needs for information and lifelong learning. In addition to making careful reductions to IMLS programs, we are also reducing our administrative budget and will be rigorously examining our operations for cost-efficiency measures.

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The NEH Office of Digital Humanities has awarded 22 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement.

The Office of Digital Humanities is happy to announce twenty-two new awards from our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program from our October 5, 2010 deadline. These awards are part of a larger slate of 216 grants just announced by the NEH.

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The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada has extended the deadline for Aid to Scholarly Journals grants to 6/30/11. Grants are up to $30,000 per year for three years.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

SSHRC recognizes that peer-reviewed scholarly journals are a primary tool for fostering intellectual debate and inquiry. Today, new information and communication technologies are changing the way research results are published and disseminated, allowing information to circulate more rapidly and widely than ever before. In response, and in accordance with SSHRC's position on open access, SSHRC has designed this funding opportunity to allow journals to seek support regardless of business model or distribution format.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

The Council on Library and Information Resources has received a $117,567 grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to study data curation issues. CLIR's Digital Library Federation will administer the grant. Chuck Henry (CLIR), Rachel Frick (DLF), and Elliott Shore (Bryn Mawr College) will be the principal investigators.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Most graduate programs in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities are not well prepared to cultivate the data management skills of their students, or sometimes even to teach them why such skills are important to the survival of their fields of study. In every discipline, at least some professionals must come to grasp the complex demands related to the creation, access, reuse, and preservation of digital research data, which have been the purview of the library and information technology professions, and of schools of library, information, and computer science.

"Developing and maintaining skills in data curation must become central to the professional identities of specialists in each discipline if our educational institutions are to build robust, efficient, and appropriately integrated online environments for future research, teaching, and learning," said CLIR President Chuck Henry. "We are grateful to the Sloan Foundation for the opportunity to deepen our understanding of the landscape that is developing around digital curation practice and education."

The project will consist of three interrelated activities. The first will be an environmental scan of professional development needs, and of education and training opportunities for digital curation in the academy. The second will be an anthropological study of five sites where digital curation activities are under way. The third will be a report that analyzes the results of the two research efforts and includes a proposal, informed by the findings, for amending the curriculum for CLIR's Postdoctoral Fellowship in Academic Libraries program.

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The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced the availability of Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grants. The maximum award is $350,000 (up to three years). The deadline is July 20, 2011.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program supports projects that provide an essential foundation for scholarship, education, and public programming in the humanities. Thousands of libraries, archives, museums, and historical organizations across the country maintain important collections of books and manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings and moving images, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, art and material culture, and digital objects. Funding from this program strengthens efforts to extend the life of such materials and make their intellectual content widely accessible, often through the use of digital technology. Awards are also made to create various reference resources that facilitate use of cultural materials, from works that provide basic information quickly to tools that synthesize and codify knowledge of a subject for in-depth investigation.

Applications may be submitted for projects that address one or more of the following activities:

• arranging and describing archival and manuscript collections;
• cataloging collections of printed works, photographs, recorded sound, moving images, art, and material culture;
• providing conservation treatment (including deacidification) for collections, leading to enhanced access;
• digitizing collections;
• preserving and improving access to born-digital sources;
• developing databases, virtual collections, or other electronic resources to codify information on a subject or to provide integrated access to selected humanities materials;
• creating encyclopedias;
• preparing linguistic tools, such as historical and etymological dictionaries, corpora, and reference grammars (separate funding is available for endangered language projects in partnership with the National Science Foundation);
• developing tools for spatial analysis and representation of humanities data, such as atlases and geographic information systems (GIS); and
• designing digital tools to facilitate use of humanities resources.

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The National Endowment for the Humanities and seven international research funders have announced the second round of the Digging into Data Challenge. Grant applications are due by June 16, 2011.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Digging into Data Challenge asks researchers these provocative questions: How can we use advanced computation to change the nature of our research methods? That is, now that the objects of study for researchers in the humanities and social sciences, including books, survey data, economic data, newspapers, music, and other scholarly and scientific resources are being digitized at a huge scale, how does this change the very nature of our research? How might advanced computation and data analysis techniques help researchers use these materials to ask new questions about and gain new insights into our world? . . .

Due to the overwhelming popularity of round one, the Digging into Data Challenge is pleased to announce that four additional funders have joined for round two, enabling this competition to have a world-wide reach into many different scholarly and scientific domains. The eight sponsoring funding bodies include the Arts & Humanities Research Council (United Kingdom), the Economic & Social Research Council (United Kingdom), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (United States), the Joint Information Systems Committee (United Kingdom), the National Endowment for the Humanities (United States), the National Science Foundation (United States), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (Netherlands), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada).

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The National Endowment for the Humanities's Division of Preservation and Access has issued a call for proposals for Preservation and Access Research and Development grants. Application deadline: May 19, 2011.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Eligible projects include:

• the development of technical standards, best practices, and tools for preserving and creating access to humanities collections;
• the exploration of more effective scientific and technical methods of preserving humanities collections;
• the development of automated procedures and computational tools to integrate, analyze, and repurpose humanities data in disparate online resources; and
• the investigation and testing of new ways of providing digital access to humanities materials that are not easily digitized using current methods.

NEH especially encourages applications that address the following topics:

• Digital Preservation: how to preserve digital humanities materials, including born-digital materials, for which there is no analog counterpart;
• Recorded Sound and Moving Image Collections: how to preserve and increase access to the record of the twentieth century contained in these formats; and
• Preventive Conservation: how to protect humanities collections and slow their deterioration through the use of sustainable preservation strategies.. . .

The maximum award is $350,000 for up to three years. Applicants whose projects focus on any of the three areas of special interest noted above may request up to $400,000.

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JISC has issued a call for grant proposals for four digital infrastructure themes: supporting usability practice, usability case studies and practical implementation, adaptable and learnable user interfaces for research tools, and campus-based publishing. A total of £500,000 is available to support funded projects. The proposal deadline is 12:00 noon (UK time) on 3/30/11.

Here's an excerpt from the "Theme D: Campus based publishing" section:

58. Projects will run for 6 months and their outputs should add value to journals by, for example:

• Converting existing journals that are currently only available in print to electronic publication
• Creating new infrastructure for existing e-journals by, for instance, using overlays on repositories or shared service provision
• Implementing innovative models of publication.
• Being open access
• Being interactive (see Internet Archaeology for an example)
• Building online communities around the journal to increase the speed and depth of scholarly exchange (see ChemSpider for an example)
• Creating a digital preservation infrastructure for the journal
• Introducing a new partnership or infrastructure to reduce publication costs

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The Library of Congress has awarded $665,248 in funding to the Omeka + Neatline project.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Scholars' Lab at the University of Virginia Library and the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University are pleased to announce a collaborative "Omeka + Neatline" initiative, supported by $665,248 in funding from the Library of Congress.

The Omeka + Neatline project's goal is to enable scholars, students, and library and museum professionals to create geospatial and temporal visualizations of archival collections using a Neatline toolset within CHNM's popular, open source Omeka exhibition platform. Neatline, a "contribution to interpretive humanities scholarship in the visual vernacular," is a project of the UVa Library Scholars' Lab, originally bolstered by a Start-Up Grant from the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Omeka is an award-winning web-publishing platform for the display of cultural heritage and scholarly collections and exhibits, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

This two-year initiative will allow CHNM and the Scholars' Lab to expand and regularize a partnership that developed informally between the two centers over the course of the past year. Collaboration has already resulted in improvements to the core functionality of Omeka by CHNM and has led the Scholars' Lab to produce a number of prototype plugins making Omeka a more attractive and viable option for scholarly partnerships with larger libraries and cultural heritage institutions. These include: improved data import (including EAD, a common archival standard); Solr-powered searching and browsing; and Fedora-based repository services. Further development will improve existing plugins, add preservation workflows, and refine the Neatline toolset for integration and sophisticated editing and scholarly annotation of historical maps, GIS layers, and timelines. Enhancements to Omeka's core APIs, improved documentation, regular "point" releases, and a new Exhibit Builder will strengthen Omeka's already large and robust user and developer communities.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |