Category: Grants and Government Funding

Paul Ginsparg Gets $882,610 Grant for arXiv Enhancement

Paul Ginsparg, professor of physics and information science at Cornell University, has been awarded a $882,610 grant by the NSF for the Tools for Open Access Cyberinfrastructure project, which will enhance the popular arXiv repository. The grant was funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Here's an excerpt from the grant award :

This project proposes to investigate and implement a variety of tools for enhancing the very widely used and popular Arxiv.org infrastructure, based on information filters for assisted service discovery and selection, text-mining, information genealogy, automated classification and identification of composite resources, data-mining, usage analyses, matching and ranking heuristics, support for next-generation document formats, and semantic markup.

Read more about it at "Stimulus Grant to Enhance arXiv E-Preprints for Scientists."

Closing the Digital Curation Gap Project

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has awarded $249,623 to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science for the Closing the Digital Curation Gap project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Scientists, researchers, and scholars across the world generate vast amounts of digital data, but the scientific record and the documentary heritage created in digital form are at risk—from technology obsolescence, from the fragility of digital media, and from the lack of baseline practices for managing and preserving digital data. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) School of Information and Library Science, working with the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and partners in the United Kingdom (U.K.), are collaborating on the Closing the Digital Curation Gap (CDCG) project to establish baseline practices for the storage, maintenance, and preservation of digital data to help ensure their enhancement and continuing long-term use. Because digital curation, or the management and preservation of digital data over the full life cycle, is of strategic importance to the library and archives fields, IMLS is funding the project through a cooperative agreement with UNC-CH. U.K. partners include the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), which supports innovation in digital technologies in U.K. colleges and universities, and its funded entities, the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC).

Well-curated data can be made accessible for a variety of audiences. For example, the data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (www.sdss.org) at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico is available to professional astronomers worldwide as well as to schoolchildren, teachers, and citizen scientists through its Galaxy Zoo project. Galaxy Zoo, now in its second version, invites citizen scientists to assist in classifying over a million galaxies (www.galaxyzoo.org). With good preservation techniques, this data will be available into the future to provide documentation of the sky as it currently appears.

Data and information science researchers have already developed many viable applications, models, strategies, and standards for the long term care of digital objects. This project will help bridge a significant gap between the progress of digital curation research and development and the professional practices of archivists, librarians, and museum curators. Project partners will develop guidelines for digital curation practices, especially for staff in small to medium-sized cultural heritage institutions where digital assets are most at risk. Larger institutions will also benefit. To develop baseline practices, a working group will establish and support a network of digital curation practitioners, researchers, and educators through face-to-face meetings, web-based communication, and other communication tools. Project staff will also use surveys, interviews, and case studies to develop a plan for ongoing development of digital curation frameworks, guidance, and best practices. The team will also promote roles that various organizations can play and identify future opportunities for collaboration.

As part of this project, the Digital Curation Manual, which is maintained by the DCC, will be updated and expanded www.dcc.ac.uk/resource/curation-manual/chapters and the Digital Curation Exchange web portal will receive support (http://digitalcurationexchange.org). Through these efforts, the CDCG project will lay the foundation that will inform future training, education, and practice. The project's research, publications, practical tool integration, and outreach and training efforts will be of value to organizations charged with maintaining digital assets over the long term.

2010 National Leadership Grant Guidelines Available

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has made its 2010 National Leadership Grant guidelines available.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is accepting grant applications for the agency’s 2010 National Leadership Grant (NLG) program. Applications, guidelines, and examples of successful proposals can be found on the agency's Web site. The deadline for submitting applications is February 1, 2010.

For the past 12 years, the National Leadership Grants program has been the capstone program for IMLS, providing the agency's highest level of support for innovative projects that provide important research, tools, and models for library and museum programs across the country. Museums and libraries interested in submitting NLG proposals to IMLS can apply for one of two types of grants: Projects or Collaborative Planning Grants. Each of these types applies to the four funding categories: Advancing Digital Resources, Library-Museum Collaboration, Research, and Demonstration.

NIH Awards $12.2 Million Grant for VIVOweb, Social Networking Software for Scientists

The National Institutes of Health have awarded the University of Florida a $12.2 million grant to develop VIVOweb. The Cornell University Library and Indiana University are grant partners.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

By fostering alliances, it is hoped that biomedical research and discovery will move faster. The project will rest on VIVO, a technology developed at Cornell since 2003. It built a comprehensive network of scientists that identified existing projects and initiated new cooperation.

"Before VIVO, the Cornell librarians heard a lot of frustration from faculty members who couldn't find collaborators from different disciplines across campus,” Medha Devare, Cornell librarian for bioinformatics and life sciences. "The idea of VIVO was to transcend administrative divisions and create a single point of access for scholarly interaction. Now that VIVO is expanding across institutions, the biomedical community will be able to benefit from that bird's eye perspective of their research."

Money for the new grant, awarded through NIH's National Center for Research Resources, originated from American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding. This has already opened eight positions at Cornell and more jobs at the other partners.

Cornell will spearhead the development of the multi-institutional functionality of the VIVO technology; the University of Florida will focus on developing technology for keeping each site's data current; and Indiana University Bloomington will develop social networking tools to enable researchers to find others with similar interests. Four other institutions — Scripps Research Institute, Juniper, Fla.; Ponce School of Medicine, Ponce, P.R.; Washington University of St. Louis; and the Weill Cornell Medical College, New York City—will serve as implementation sites.

Jon Corson-Rikert, head of Information Technology Services at Cornell's Mann Library, initially developed VIVO in 2003. As researchers and administrators embraced the newly created network, a team of programmers, designers and librarians expanded the project to all other disciplines at Cornell.

Other universities began to explore the open-source, free software. VIVO has been adopted for local networks at other universities and institutions in the United States, Australia and China. This new project will follow VIVO's original model and build a multi-institutional platform for the biomedical community.

The Cornell effort to develop VIVOweb will be led by Dean Krafft, the Library's chief technology strategist, Corson-Rikert and Devare. VIVOweb's open Semantic Web/Linked Data approach will empower researchers to extend their research communities—not just via prior knowledge or serendipity, but through recommendation or suggestion networks based on common traits described in the VIVOweb researcher profiles.

Columbia University Libraries and Cornell University Library Awarded Grant for 2CUL Partnership

The Columbia University Libraries and the Cornell University Library have received a grant to fund their 2CUL partnership project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $385,000 to the libraries at Columbia University in New York City and Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., to support the development of an innovative partnership dubbed "2CUL." This new relationship has the potential to become the most expansive collaboration to date between major research libraries.

Starting this fall, Cornell and Columbia will plan significant partnerships in collaborative collection development, acquisitions and processing. The two universities will form a separate service entity to facilitate the collaboration. Ithaka, a not-for-profit organization that assists research libraries and the academic community to leverage advancing information technologies, will provide project management and assist in the planning. Initial work will focus on several global collecting areas, as well as collaborative funding and support of technical infrastructure in various areas.

2CUL — pronounced "too cool" — stands for the acronyms of both Columbia University Library and Cornell University Library. The partnership is not a merger, and the two libraries remain separate institutions.

"2CUL represents a new, radical form of collaboration that pairs two leading research libraries in a voluntary, equal partnership," said James G. Neal, Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University. "Columbia University Libraries and Cornell University Library are committed to developing an enduring and transformative partnership that will enable us to achieve greater efficiencies and effectiveness and to address new challenges through combined forces."

"2CUL will ameliorate the impact of budget cuts while building our librarie' ability to innovate," said Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell University. "This partnership is predicated on Cornell and Columbia’s shared commitment to reinvigorate our libraries in response to and in anticipation of changes in digital access, interdisciplinary research and scholarly communication. It also allows us to provide the best possible experience for our users."

Over the next two years, 2CUL will explore ways to improve the quality of collections and services offered to campus constituencies, redirect resources to emerging needs, and make each institution more competitive in securing government and foundation support. The relationship could also provide a new blueprint for broad, non-exclusive partnerships between other academic libraries and other parts of the academy.

Georgia Tech Library Awarded $857,005 Grant to Build Statewide Digital Repository

The Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Information Center has been awarded a $857,005 grant for its "The GALILEO Knowledge Repository (GKR): Advancing the Access and Management of Scholarly Digital Content" project.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Georgia Tech, in partnership with the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, the Medical College of Georgia, Georgia Southern University, Valdosta State University, Albany State University, North Georgia College and State University, and the College of Coastal Georgia, will build a statewide digital repository to provide access to scholarly works and research information. The principal investigator on the grant is Tyler Walters, Associate Director for Technology and Resource Services, the Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Information Center; the co-PI is P. Toby Graham, Director, Digital Library of Georgia, University of Georgia Libraries.

The scholarly works and research information to be held by the GKR are materials such as:

Annual Reports; Audio/Video Recordings; Conference Papers; Electronic Theses and Dissertations; Instructional Materials; Lecture Series and Symposia Materials; Newsletters; Pre-Prints/Post-Prints; Proceedings; Research and Technical Reports; Web Sites; White Papers; and Working Papers.

The GKR program has five activities that it will complete during the grant:

  1. Conduct a survey and focus groups of the USG librarians' and faculty's usage and perceptions of digital repositories.
  2. Establish a service to host individual repositories for four participating USG institutions (Medical College of Georgia, Georgia Southern University, Albany State University, College of Coastal Georgia)
  3. Build a central, searchable web site and database from all eight GKR-related digital repositories, featuring the GKR-developed repository collection mapping tool. This will be done by harvesting database records from all eight GKR-related digital repositories (the four hosted repositories mentioned above, plus existing repositories at Georgia Tech, University of Georgia, Georgia State University, and Valdosta State University).
  4. Establish repository-related services for the GKR partners: copyright assistance, digitization, content submission into their repository, and digital preservation
  5. Design and offer to a nationwide audience a symposium and workshop on managing statewide and consortial repositories. The goal of the training program is to increase the number of digital repositories operating in the U.S. and the number of information professionals with the knowledge and skills to manage repositories consortially.

Mining a Million Scanned Books: Linguistic and Structure Analysis, Fast Expanded Search, and Improved OCR Grant Awarded

The NSF Division of Information & Intelligent Systems has awarded a grant to the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at UMass Amherst, the Perseus Digital Library Project at Tufts, and the Internet Archive for their "Mining a Million Scanned Books: Linguistic and Structure Analysis, Fast Expanded Search, and Improved OCR" proposal.

Here's an excerpt from the award abstract:

The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at UMass Amherst, the Perseus Digital Library Project at Tufts, and the Internet Archive are investigating large-scale information extraction and retrieval technologies for digitized book collections. To provide effective analysis and search for scholars and the general public, and to handle the diversity and scale of these collections, this project focuses on improvements in seven interlocking technologies: improved OCR accuracy through word spotting, creating probabilistic models using joint distributions of features, and building topic-specific language models across documents; structural metadata extraction, to mine headers, chapters, tables of contents, and indices; linguistic analysis and information extraction, to perform syntactic analysis and entity extraction on noisy OCR output; inferred document relational structure, to mine citations, quotations, translations, and paraphrases; latent topic modeling through time, to improve language modeling for OCR and retrieval, and to track the spread of ideas across periods and genres; query expansion for relevance models, to improve relevance in information retrieval by offline pre-processing of document comparisons; and interfaces for exploratory data analysis, to provide users of the document collection with efficient tools to update complex models of important entities, events, topics, and linguistic features. When applied across large corpora, these technologies reinforce each other: improved topic modeling enables more targeted language models for OCR; extracting structural metadata improves citation analysis; and entity extraction improves topic modeling and query expansion. The testbed for this project is the growing corpus of over one million open-access books from the Internet Archive.

Institute of Museum and Library Services Announces Award of National Leadership Grants to 51 Institutions

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has announced the award of National Leadership Grants to 51 institutions.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the primary source of federal funds for the nation's museums and libraries, announces the 51 institutions receiving National Leadership Grants (NLG) totaling $17,894,475. Projects by these institutions will advance the ability of museums and libraries to preserve culture, heritage, and knowledge while enhancing learning.

"Projects funded by IMLS's National Leadership Grants focus on education, health, computer literacy, and problem solving skills. We believe that museums and libraries play an important role in building a competitive workforce and engaged citizenry. We are equally confident that these institutions will elevate museum and library practice through this work," said Anne-Imelda Radice, IMLS Director.

NLG recipients will generate new tools, research, models, services, practices, and alliances that will positively impact the awarded institution and the nation.

Also see the list of grants by state.

An Evaluation of Private Foundation Copyright Licensing Policies, Practices and Opportunities

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society has released An Evaluation of Private Foundation Copyright Licensing Policies

Here's an excerpt:

This project, a joint effort of the Berkman Center, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Ford Foundation and the Open Society Institute, with funding from Hewlett and Ford, undertook to examine the copyright licensing policies and practices of a group of twelve private foundations. In particular, it looked at the extent to which charitable foundations are aware of and have begun to use open licenses such as Creative Commons or the GPL. We surveyed foundation staff and leaders and examined a number of examples where foundations have begun to take advantage of new licensing models for materials and resources produced by their own staff, their consultants and their grantees. The complete results of our study and our comprehensive analysis and recommendations are contained in the full Report of this project.

Six TexTreasures Digitization Grants Awarded

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission has awarded digitization grants to six TexShare member libraries.

Here's an excerpt from the press release :

The exciting projects that have been funded are:

  • "Houston Oral History Project" ($25,000) – The Houston Public Library is partnering with Houston Mayor Bill White to preserve and make the video-recordings of significant Houstonians available on the web. This grant will convert an additional 288 hours of audiotapes from cassette or reel-to-reel to digital format along with transcripts for the collection.
  • "The Bexar Archives" ($19,930) – The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin will create a research tool, called Bexar Archives Online, which joins digital images of the original Spanish documents with the corresponding English-language translations.
  • "Marion Butts Photography Negatives Project" ($17,571) – The Dallas Public Library will use the photographic records produced by Marion Butts, an African-American photographer and editor of the Dallas Express, as well as other primary source materials such as maps, Negro city directories and oral histories to develop a series of online Texas-focused, TEKS-based lesson plans targeting seventh grade students. The records chronicle Dallas and Texas history during the segregation and civil rights eras.
  • "Lady Bird Johnson Photo Collection Project" ($16,610) – The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at the University of Texas at Austin will digitize and provide access to a unique collection of photographs of Claudia Taylor "Lady Bird" Johnson. She is the wife of former President Lyndon B. Johnson, and was born in Karnack, Texas. As the First Lady of the United States from 1963-69, she was an advocate for nature, beautification and conservation of natural resources. Most of the photographs in this collection date after her return to Texas.
  • "Itinerant Photographer Collection" ($14,389) – The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin will preserve and digitize a collection of glass plate negatives depicting local businesses owners and employees in Corpus Christi, which were taken by an unidentified photographer in February 1934 during the Depression. The center will provide an online finding aid, an online catalog record and an online exhibit of the fragile items now in danger of emulsion loss.
  • "Tejano Voices Project" ($6,500) – The University of Texas at Arlington Library will digitize and describe 13 oral history interviews from notable Tejanos and Tejanas from across Texas conducted in 1992-2003 by Dr. Jose Angel Gutierrez, associate professor of political science at UT Arlington. Many of the interviews emphasize the personal struggles, from individuals of Mexican decent, who are the first in their communities elected or appointed to government offices. The interviews also reflect the history of the Tejano community as it pressed for an end to racial segregation in the state and access to political power in the post-WWII period.

Open Annotation Collaboration Funded

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $362,000 to the Open Annotation Collaboration to "build new digital annotation tools and define and demonstrate a framework for sharing annotations of digital content across the World Wide Web."

Here's an excerpt from the press release on JESSE:

The OAC includes humanities scholars, librarians, and information scientists from four universities—George Mason University, the University of Illinois, the University of Maryland, and the University of Queensland (Australia)—from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, and from the Office of Advanced Technology Research at JSTOR, an integrated online archive of over five million items digitized from scholarly journals and primary source archives. . . .

The OAC effort will focus on annotation interoperability, creating data models, standards, and tools that allow scholars working in disparate locations to share and leverage annotations of digital resources across the boundaries of individual annotation applications and content collections.

As part of the OAC Phase I work funded by the Mellon Foundation, a new annotation tool, leveraging ongoing work at the Maryland Institute for the Humanities (MITH) that was initiated previously with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, will be integrated into the popular Zotero Firefox Web browser extension. Created by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, Zotero helps users collect, manage, and cite research sources found on the World Wide Web.

In parallel with this work, researchers at the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the eResearch Lab of the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE) at The University of Queensland in Australia will examine the breadth and diversity of current annotation models and system architectures in the context of scholarly practices and scholarly-focused use cases involving annotations in both online and traditional settings. . . .

The co-Principal Investigators for the OAC Phase I project are Timothy W. Cole of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Neil Fraistat of the University of Maryland, Jane Hunter of the University of Queensland, and Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

All work produced as part of the OAC Phase I project will be made available under open source license for the free use and exploitation by other scholars and non-profit educational, scholarly and charitable institutions.

Arizona’s SIRLS Gets $900,000+ IMLS Grant for Online Digital Information Management Graduate Certificate Program

The University of Arizona's School of Information Resources and Library Science has received a grant of over $900,000 from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services for its Digital Information Management (DigIn) online graduate certificate program. The grant will primarily be used to fund scholarships.

Here's the press release:

The DigIn curriculum combines intensive, hands-on technology learning with a thorough grounding in the theoretical principles needed to manage large and complex digital collections.

The program takes a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to managing digital information and is designed to support a wide range of career paths, especially involving libraries, museums, archives, and records management.

Graduate certificates are increasingly being recognized as a means for professionals with advanced degrees to update their knowledge and skills. DigIn also offers a path for those with undergraduate degrees who are interested in digital collections but who may not yet be ready to commit to a full degree program.

The grant will also greatly boost DigIn's mission to foster disciplinary, institutional, geographic, and cultural diversity in the management of digital collections and services.

Thus, DigIn strongly encourages scholarship applicants representing historically underserved institutions, regions, and communities, as well as students expressing interest in working with digital collections in culturally diverse settings.

DigIn is now accepting applications for admission and financial aid for the Fall 2009 semester. The application deadline has just been extended to July 10.

Late applications will be accepted, though Fall admission cannot be guaranteed once the July 10 deadline has passed. Late applicants will also be considered for admission in the Spring 2010 semester.

The program is delivered entirely online and does not require students to reside in or travel to Tucson. Students generally complete the certificate in 4-6 semesters (15-27 months).

DigIn was founded in 2007 with major funding from Institute of Museum and Library Services, the primary source of federal support for the nation?s 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute's mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas.

Our current partners also include the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Sedona Conference.

Additional details on the program including course descriptions, admissions requirements and application forms may be found on the program website:

digin.arizona.edu

Prospective applicants are also welcome to contact the DigIn staff at:

digin@email.arizona.edu

Read more about it at "SIRLS Earns Federal Grant to Train More Tech Savvy Librarians ."

Foundation Grants for Preservation in Libraries, Archives, and Museums, 2009 Edition

The Library of Congress and the Foundation Center have released Foundation Grants for Preservation in Libraries, Archives, and Museums, 2009 Edition.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This publication lists 1,944 grants of $5,000 or more awarded by 488 foundations, from 2004 through the publication date of this guide. It covers grants to public, academic, research, school, and special libraries, and to archives and museums for activities related to conservation and preservation. This publication includes:

  • an introduction that explains the book's coverage, arrangement, entries, and how to research using the volume. Note: This PDF file contains hotlinks to free online tutorials that cover grant writing and provide an insight into the world of U.S. foundation giving offered by the Foundation Center, as well as to some other widely used non-profit guidance on preservation grants found on the Conservation Online web site.
  • a statistical analysis of grant funding in the area of preservation by foundation, recipient location, subject, recipient type (e.g., Library), grant size, and foundation generosity nationwide.
  • state-by-state descriptions of projects funded in preservation nationwide including the foundation's name, limitations on giving, recipient(s), size of grants, and purpose of the grant described. Note: This section is hot linked in the PDF version directly to more detailed descriptions of the foundations.
  • indexes by recipient, geographic area of the recipient, and subject. Note: If you do not find what you are looking for in the indices, use the find feature to search the text for your term.
  • a list of all foundations that have donated to preservation and conservation with their contact information and limitations on giving.

Dryad Repository Gets $2.18 Million Grant from the National Science Foundation

The Dryad Repository has received a $2.18 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The repository, called Dryad, is designed to archive data that underlie published findings in evolutionary biology, ecology and related fields and allow scientists to access and build on each other’s findings.

The grant recipients are:

The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and the Metadata Research Center have been developing Dryad in coordination with a large group of Journals and Societies in evolutionary biology and ecology. With the new grant, the additional team members are contributing to the development of the repository. . . .

Currently, a tremendous amount of information underlying published research findings is lost, researchers say. The lack of data sharing and preservation makes it impossible for the data to be examined or re-used by future investigators.

Dryad addresses these shortcomings and allows scientists to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, integrate data across studies and look for trends through statistical meta-analysis.

"The Dryad project seeks to enable scientists to generate new knowledge using existing data," said Kathleen Smith, Ph.D., principal investigator for the grant, a biology professor at Duke and director of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. "The key to Dryad in our view is making data deposition a routine and easy part of the publication process."

Six University Presses Get Mellon Grant for Archaeology of the Americas Digital Monograph Initiative

The Alabama Press, University of Arizona Press, the University Press of Colorado, the University Press of Florida, the Texas A&M University Press and the University of Utah Press have received a $282,000 one-year planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Archaeology of the Americas Digital Monograph Initiative, a digital collection of New World archaeology scholarship.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Together, the institutions will explore ways to deliver data- and illustration-rich digital editions of cutting-edge archaeological research.

The project, the "Archaeology of the Americas Digital Monograph Initiative," will give scholars and professional archaeologists the ability to review supplemental data not often contained in conventionally published volumes.

"This initiative enables each press to break out of the traditional monograph form, in which it is often financially impossible to offer digital resources alongside the book," said Kathryn Conrad, interim director of the UA Press. . . .

The books produced as part of this initiative will be enhanced by large data sets, color illustrations, video components, three-dimensional, rotatable images, and in some cases, interactive components such as reader commenting. . . .

If the program reaches full implementation, the presses could potentially create a third-party entity devoted to the creation and maintenance of the digital platform.

The presses also plan to work on a business model for the proposed platform. In addition, the presses plan to develop a prototype digital book, providing a workable platform that could potentially be used by scholarly presses around the world.

NSF Awards about $5 Million to 14 Universities to Participate in the IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative

The National Science Foundation has awarded about $5 million in grants to 14 universities to participate in the IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The initiative will provide the computing infrastructure for leading-edge research projects that could help us better understand our planet, our bodies, and pursue the limits of the World Wide Web.

In 2007, IBM and Google announced a joint university initiative to help computer science students gain the skills they need to build cloud applications. Now, NSF is using the same infrastructure and open source methods to award CLuE grants to universities around the United States. Through this program, universities will use software and services running on an IBM/Google cloud to explore innovative research ideas in data-intensive computing. These projects cover a range of activities that could lead not only to advances in computing research, but also to significant contributions in science and engineering more broadly.

NSF awarded Cluster Exploratory (CLuE) program grants to Carnegie-Mellon University, Florida International University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, University of California-Irvine, University of California-San Diego, University of California-Santa Barbara, University of Maryland, University of Massachusetts, University of Virginia, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, University of Utah and Yale University.

NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grants

The National Endowment for the Humanities has issued a call for grant proposals for its Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Program.

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, electronic records, 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 include or combine the following activities:

  • arranging and describing archival and manuscript collections;
  • cataloging collections of printed works, photographs, recorded sound, moving images, art, and material culture;
  • implementing preservation measures, such as basic rehousing, reformatting, deacidification, or conservation treatment;
  • digitizing collections, or preserving and improving access to born-digital resources;
  • developing databases, virtual collections, or other electronic resources to codify information on a subject field 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 geographical information systems (GIS); and
  • designing digital tools to facilitate use of humanities resources.

NEH Preservation and Access Research and Development Grants

The National Endowment for the Humanities is soliciting applications for Preservation and Access Research and Development grants, with an 7/30/09 deadline.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Preservation and Access Research and Development grants support projects that address major challenges in preserving or providing access to humanities collections and resources. These challenges include the need to find better ways to preserve materials of critical importance to the nation's cultural heritage—from fragile artifacts and manuscripts to analog recordings and digital assets subject to technological obsolescence—and to develop advanced modes of searching, discovering, and using such materials. . . .

NEH especially encourages applications that address the following areas:

  • Digital Preservation: how to preserve digital humanities materials, including those for which no analog counterparts exist;
  • 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 and slow the deterioration of humanities collections through the use of sustainable preservation strategies.

JISC Issues Call for Information Environment Rapid Innovation Grants

JISC has issued a call for Information Environment Rapid Innovation Grants proposals.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Proposals are sought under the following priority areas:

  • Mashups of open data
  • Aggregating tags and feeds
  • Semantic web/ linked data
  • Data search
  • Visualisation
  • Personalisation
  • Mobile Technologies
  • Lightweight Shared Infrastructure Services
  • User Interface Design

NEH Funds 197 Humanities Projects

The National Endowment for the Humanities has made $20 million in grant awards/offers to 197 humanities projects.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The funding announced today will support a variety of projects in diverse fields of the humanities. Projects receiving support will, for example, provide college faculty the opportunity to deepen their knowledge in the humanities to enhance undergraduate instruction; support high-quality media projects for public audiences that explore significant ideas and events in the humanities; enable researchers to record and archive languages facing extinction; and encourage the development of innovations in the digital humanities.

This award cycle, institutions and individuals in 36 states and the District of Columbia will receive NEH support. Projects undertaken by American scholars working outside the United States are also receiving support. A complete state-by-state listing of grants and offers of matching funds is available below:

JISC Digitisation Programme Will Issue New Funding Call within Weeks

The JISC Digitisation Programme has announced that it will issue a new funding call at the end of the month or at the beginning of March.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The call will focus on 3 key themes:

  1. institutional skills and strategies, including activities aimed at embedding digitisation into institutional strategies and practices, eg development of institutional skills, policies and capacity to perform digitisation; creating, or building on existing, institutional infrastructure, workflows and processes to streamline digitisation; developing partnerships and collaborative models at regional or other levels aimed at carrying out digitisation in a more cost effective way, for example by reaching economies of scale, or capitalising on institutions’ own particular areas of expertise in different aspects of digitisation activity, and through fostering knowledge exchange and sharing of good practice;
  2. enhancing existing online digital collections in order to increase their current use, including enhancing interfaces, enriching existing metadata, improving resource discovery mechanisms, for example by making use of Web 2.0 networks and functinalities or search engine optimisation, promotion and marketing activities within relevant research and teaching communities as well as embedding resources into teaching and learning;
  3. clustering of existing online digital collections, in order to create critical mass of content and increase its current use, including bringing together collections which have been identified as being complementary from a thematic, chronological or format point of view or making use of existing platforms and services to deliver digital content through a variety of entry points. This may involve merging the metadata or technical infrastructure for related resources; developing cross-search functionality; exploiting Web2.0 methodologies such as data mash-ups to "cross-fertilise" the content in existing resources.

Grants: TexTreasures Grants for Digitization and Other Purposes

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission has announced the availability of FY 2010 TexTreasures grants to members of the TexShare Library Consortium or non-profit organizations that are applying on behalf of TexShare members.

Here's an excerpt from the guidelines:

The TexTreasures grant program provides assistance and encouragement to libraries to provide access to their special or unique holdings, and to make information about these holdings available to all Texans. Applicants may propose projects designed to increase accessibility through a wide range of activities such as organizing, cataloging, indexing, or digitizing local materials. . . .

The maximum award for FY 2010 is $20,000 for a single institution and $25,000 for collaborative grant projects. While applicants are encouraged to provide support for the project with matching funds or in-kind resources, matching funds are not a requirement for TexTreasures grants.

Grants: Digging into Data Challenge from JISC, NEH, NSF, and SSHRC

The Joint Information Systems Committee, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council have announced The Digging into Data Challenge.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Digging into Data Challenge encourages humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis, challenging scholars to develop international partnerships and explore vast digital resources, including electronic repositories of books, newspapers, and photographs to identify new opportunities for scholarship.

Applicants will form international teams from at least two of the participating countries. Winning teams will receive grants from two or more of the funding agencies and, one year later, will be invited to present their work at a special conference. These teams, which may be composed of scholars and scientists, will be asked to demonstrate how data mining and data analysis tools currently used in the sciences can improve humanities and social science scholarship. The hope of this competition is that these projects will serve as exemplars to the field and encourage new, international partnerships among scholars, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and others. . . .

In order to apply, interested applicants must first submit a letter of intent by March 15, 2009. Final applications will be due July 15, 2009.