Grants and Government Funding – Page 8

Action Alert: Proposed FY2011 Continuing Resolution Amendment Would Eliminate Institute of Museum and Library Services’s Funding

A proposed amendment (no. 35) to the FY2011 Continuing Resolution amendment by U.S. Rep. Scott Garret (R-NJ) would eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Services’s funding.

You can use the ALA's "ADVOCACY URGENTLY NEEDED: House Considering Two Amendments Critical to the Future Of Libraries" web page to contact your Representative about this issue.

In related news, President Obama's budget requests $242,605,000 for fiscal year 2012 for the IMLS.

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Major Changes Could Be Ahead for JISC: HEFCE Review of JISC

The Higher Education Funding Council for England has released the HEFCE Review of JISC.

Here's an excerpt from the recommendations:

• JISC activity should be focused on achieving a large impact:

Activities need to be clearly linked to the sectors’ priorities

JISC should offer sector leadership through "routes to best practice," wherever such practice resides

Research and development activity should focus on horizon-scanning and thought leadership

Services and projects should be rationalised, with a view to significantly reducing their number

• JISC should be funded through a combination of grants and subscriptions/user charges

• It should become a separate legal entity and the implications of this for the four companies should be reviewed

• Governance arrangements should be clarified, to ensure that the Board takes clear overall strategic control

• The internal structure should be clarified and simplified, to improve efficiency and control

• A plan for the proposed internal structure and operations should estimate the savings to be achieved

• There should be discussions between JISC, the funders, sector representatives and other bodies, to determine an overall funding strategy for ICT in the HE and FE sectors.

Read more about it at "Questions and Answers—HEFCE's Review of JISC."

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Action Alert: H.R. 408 Would Eliminate National Endowment for the Humanities

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has introduced H.R. 408, the Spending Reduction Act of 2011, which would eliminate the National Endowment for the Humanities. Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) has introduced similar legislation (S. 178) in the Senate.

The National Humanities Alliance has posted two items about this issue: "Republican Study Committee Leaders Unveil Spending Reduction Act of 2011" and, on the DuraSpace Blog, "Proposal to Eliminate the National Endowment for the Humanities in U.S. Congress."

You can use the NHA's Legislative Action Center Contact Form to send messages to your Congressional representatives. The form includes suggested bullet points that you can include in your message.

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MIT Libraries Awarded $650,000 grant from the Library of Congress for Exhibit 3.0 Project

The MIT Libraries have been awarded a $650,000 grant from the Library of Congress for the Exhibit 3.0 Project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The MIT Libraries has been awarded a $650,000 grant from the Library of Congress for work in collaboration with the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and Zepheira, Inc. on "Exhibit 3.0," a new project to redesign and expand upon Exhibit, the popular open source software tool for searching, browsing and visualizing data on the Web. The goal is to provide libraries, cultural institutions and other organizations grappling with large amounts of digital content, with an enhanced tool that is scalable and useful for data management, visualization and navigation. According to the Library of Congress, "It is the Library's intent that this work also will further contribute to the collaborative knowledge sharing among the broader communities concerned about the critical infrastructure that will ensure sustainability and accessibility of digital content over time."

"This innovative work has already made a considerable impact on digital content communities whose data is diverse and complex. The visualizations bring new understanding to users and curators alike," said Martha Anderson, Director of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress. "We're extremely fortunate to have the support of the Library of Congress on this important research," said Ann Wolpert, director of the MIT Libraries. "Our hope is that Exhibit 3.0 will be a useful tool in tackling the daunting challenge all libraries face in ensuring the future sustainability and accessibility of our digital content."

Exhibit was originally developed as part of the MIT Simile Project (simile.mit.edu), an ambitious collaboration of the MIT Libraries, the MIT CSAIL, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to explore applications of the Semantic Web to problems of information management across both large-scale digital libraries and small-scale personal collections. Exhibit runs inside a Web browser and supports many types of information using common Web standards for data publishing. Since its release, Exhibit has been used by thousands of websites worldwide across a range of diverse industries including cultural heritage, libraries, publishers, medical research, life science and government. Most recently Exhibit has been used by DATA.GOV (http://data.gov/), an Open Government Initiative by President Obama's administration to increase public access to high value data generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. The application has been used to help demonstrate new ways of visualizing government data. . . .

The Exhibit 3.0 project will redesign and re-implement Exhibit to scale from small collections to very large data collections of the magnitude created by the Library of Congress and its National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). The redesigned Exhibit will be as simple to use as the current tool but more scalable, more modular, and easier to integrate into a variety of information management systems and websites—offering an improved user experience.

In addition to the Library of Congress, the MIT Libraries and other organizations that manage large quantities of data will collaborate on the project for their own collections. A major focus of the project will be to build a lively community around Exhibit, of both users of the software and software developers, to help continuously improve the open source tool. Another aspect of the new project will incorporate research by students at MIT's CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab) on personal information management. The research will focus on improving the user experience working with data in Exhibit, and incorporating new data visualization techniques that allow users to explore data in novel ways. "Impressive data-interactive sites abound on the web, but right now you need a team of developers to create them. Exhibit demonstrated that authoring data-interactive sites can be as easy as authoring a static web page. With Exhibit 3.0 we can move from a prototype to a robust platform that anyone can use to author (not program) rich interactive information visualizations that effectively communicate with their users," said David Karger, computer science professor with CSAIL.

The project will begin in January for a period of one year, and a new website and other communication channels will be publicized soon. For more information see http://similewidgets.org/exhibit3.

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$500 Million in U.S. Department of Labor Grants Will Include Support for Open Educational Resources under Creative Commons BY License

The White House has announced the solicitation of the initial grants in the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program. About $500 million in grant funding will be available in the first round of grants.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan ushered in a new era of hope and opportunity for millions of Americans today when they revealed the innovative application criteria for the first $500 million in grants under the four-year, $2 billion Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program. Grants will support the development and improvement of a new generation of free, post-secondary educational programs of two years or less that prepare students for successful careers in emerging and expanding industries.

This effort, which was developed and designed in consultation with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, sets the stage for what promises to become one of the most significant expansions in access to high-quality education and job training opportunities ever. These new investments will also play a major role in helping the Nation achieve the goal set by President Obama last year that by 2020 the United States will once again have the most highly educated workforce in the world.

But what matters most is what these new freely-available resources will mean to individuals.

By relying on evidence-based approaches and requiring that all materials produced be openly licensed for free use, adaptation, and improvement by others, this groundbreaking federal effort will bring free, high-quality curriculum and employment training opportunities within reach of anyone who has access to the Internet.

Open Educational Resources are learning materials that have been released under an intellectual property license that allows their free use by others. The materials produced as a result of these grants will carry the Creative Commons BY license, which also permits their free derivative use for commercial purposes. That means companies, schools, entrepreneurs, and others will be free to bundle,adapt, or customize the learning materials to create new offerings, products, and services. Schools will be able to affordably offer courses in subject areas and at levels of expertise previously beyond their reach. Students will be able to access free educational materials, including complete courses, and supportive services designed to help them accomplish their educational and job-training goals.

Millions of students around the world have already benefited from Open Educational Resources in the decade since then-Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) President Charles Vest established MIT's pioneering OpenCourseWare project, the first of its type, based on a proposal from members of his faculty. The goal, Vest explained in 2001, was to make all of the learning materials used by MIT's faculty in the school's 1,800 courses available via the Internet, where they could be used and repurposed as desired by others without charge.

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National Historical Publications and Records Commission Grants

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission has funded 53 grant proposals, including seven digitization projects.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

DIGITIZATION
Grants for digitizing entire archival collections of historical importance.

Georgia State University
Atlanta, GA                                            $90,102
The PATCO Records Digitization Project.
A 20-month project to digitize eight series—approximately 179,000 scans—of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) records from the union's national office.

Getty Research Institute
Los Angeles, CA                                  $100,790
Living the American Dream: Housing and Urban Development in Los Angeles, 1936-1997.
A two year project to digitize and make available online approximately 60,500 images from the Leonard Nadel Papers and the Julius Shulman Photography Archive.

Library of Virginia
Richmond, VA                                     $150,000
Augusta County, VA, Chancery Records, 1745-1912.
A two year project to digitize the Augusta County Chancery Court records, consisting of 460 cubic feet totally approximately 900,000 images representing 10,437 cases. .

Marist College
Poughkeepsie, NY                                $103,979
Lowell Thomas Papers Digitization Project.
A project to digitize 36,164 images, including 8,000 glass plate negatives, 6,500 lantern slides, 13,000 photographic prints, 300 stereopticon cards, 1,800 film negatives, and more items in the Graphic Materials Series in Lowell Thomas Papers, a collection drawn from the works of the 20th century American writer and broadcaster.

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Rutgers, NJ                                            $57,390
Housing Law and Policy Digital Archive.
A project to digitize two collections of materials, totaling 94,000 pages, in the areas of public housing law and urban history.

University of Illinois, Chicago
Chicago, IL                                            $47,099
Chicago: Photographic Images of Change.
A two year project to digitize approximately 30,275 photographs of historic Chicago sites, streets, neighborhoods and buildings contained within the James S. Parker collection (1900-2003) and the Chicago Photographic collection (ca. 1890-1970).

University of North Texas
Denton, TX                                           $30,509
The Civil War and Reconstruction.
Aone year project to digitize and make available online a group of eight 19th century collections totaling 22,412 pages. The records span from 1823-1919, but the bulk of the records date from the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

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2011 IMLS National Leadership Grant Guidelines Released

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has released grant program guidelines for its 2011 National Leadership Grant program.

Here's an excerpt:

Applications for Project or Collaborative Planning Grants may be submitted in the following categories:

Advancing Digital Resources: Support the creation, use, presentation, and preservation of significant digital resources as well as the development of tools to enhance access, use, and management of digital assets.

Research: Support projects that have the potential to improve museum, archival, and library practice, resource use, programs, and services. Both basic and applied research projects are encouraged.

Demonstration: Support projects that produce a replicable model or practice that is usable by other institutions for improving services and performance.

Library-Museum Collaboration Grants: Support collaborative projects that address the educational, economic, cultural, and social needs of a community.

Read more about it at "2011 National Leadership Grant Guidelines Now Available."

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NSF Data Sharing Policy Released

The National Science Foundation has released its revised NSF Data Sharing Policy. As of January 18, 2011, NSF proposals must include a two-page (or less) "Data Management Plan" in accordance with the Grant Proposal Guide, chapter II.C.2.j (see below excerpt).

Here's an excerpt from the Award and Administration Guide, chapter VI.D.4:

b. Investigators are expected to share with other researchers, at no more than incremental cost and within a reasonable time, the primary data, samples, physical collections and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of work under NSF grants. Grantees are expected to encourage and facilitate such sharing. Privileged or confidential information should be released only in a form that protects the privacy of individuals and subjects involved. General adjustments and, where essential, exceptions to this sharing expectation may be specified by the funding NSF Program or Division/Office for a particular field or discipline to safeguard the rights of individuals and subjects, the validity of results, or the integrity of collections or to accommodate the legitimate interest of investigators. A grantee or investigator also may request a particular adjustment or exception from the cognizant NSF Program Officer.

c. Investigators and grantees are encouraged to share software and inventions created under the grant or otherwise make them or their products widely available and usable.

d. NSF normally allows grantees to retain principal legal rights to intellectual property developed under NSF grants to provide incentives for development and dissemination of inventions, software and publications that can enhance their usefulness, accessibility and upkeep. Such incentives do not, however, reduce the responsibility that investigators and organizations have as members of the scientific and engineering community, to make results, data and collections available to other researchers.

Here's an excerpt from the Grant Proposal Guide, chapter II.C.2.j:

Plans for data management and sharing of the products of research. Proposals must include a supplementary document of no more than two pages labeled “Data Management Plan”. This supplement should describe how the proposal will conform to NSF policy on the dissemination and sharing of research results (see AAG Chapter VI.D.4), and may include:

the types of data, samples, physical collections, software, curriculum materials, and other materials to be produced in the course of the project;

the standards to be used for data and metadata format and content (where existing standards are absent or deemed inadequate, this should be documented along with any proposed solutions or remedies);

policies for access and sharing including provisions for appropriate protection of privacy, confidentiality, security, intellectual property, or other rights or requirements;

policies and provisions for re-use, re-distribution, and the production of derivatives; and

plans for archiving data, samples, and other research products, and for preservation of access to them.

A May 2010 NSF press release ("Scientists Seeking NSF Funding Will Soon Be Required to Submit Data Management Plans") discussed the background for the policy:

"Science is becoming data-intensive and collaborative," noted Ed Seidel, acting assistant director for NSF's Mathematical and Physical Sciences directorate. "Researchers from numerous disciplines need to work together to attack complex problems; openly sharing data will pave the way for researchers to communicate and collaborate more effectively."

"This is the first step in what will be a more comprehensive approach to data policy," added Cora Marrett, NSF acting deputy director. "It will address the need for data from publicly-funded research to be made public."

Preserving Virtual Worlds II Gets $785,898 IMLS Grant

The Preserving Virtual Worlds II project has been awarded a $785,898 National Leadership Grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Preserving Virtual Worlds II: Methods for Evaluating and Preserving Significant Properties of Educational Games and Complex Interactive Environments (PVW2) is led by GSLIS Assistant Professor Jerome McDonough in partnership with the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Maryland, and Stanford University. PVW2 plans to help improve the capacity of libraries, museums, and archives to preserve computer games, video games, and interactive fiction.

The original Preserving Virtual Worlds project, funded by the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIP), investigated what preservation issues arose with computer games and interactive fiction, and how existing metadata and packaging standards might be employed for the long-term preservation of these materials. PVW2 will focus on determining properties for a variety of educational games and game franchises in order to provide a set of best practices for preserving the materials through virtualization technologies and migration, as well as provide an analysis of how the preservation process is documented. PVW2 is a two-year project, to be conducted between October 2010 and September 2012.

Read more about it at "Preserving Virtual Worlds 2 Funded."

ARL and Ithaka S+R Get $464,286 IMLS Grant for Digitized Special Collections Research

ARL and Ithaka S+R have received a $464,286 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grants Program “to study how libraries, archives, and museums are sustaining digitized special collections.”

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"Our examination of digital resources through our case studies work showed us that project leaders need practical tools to help them ensure their project's long-term sustainability," says Laura Brown, Managing Director, Ithaka S+R. "This collaborative study will respond to that need by providing actionable recommendations, best practices, and planning tools to help project leaders in higher education, public libraries, museums, historical societies, and other organizations plan for sustaining their own special collections digitization projects."

Project activities under this cooperative agreement will include a survey of digitized special collections and focused interviews with leaders and project staff in selected cultural heritage organizations who manage those collections. The study’s final report of lessons learned, recommendations, and case studies will be freely shared through the partners’ websites, through a webcast, and conference presentations.

JISC e-Content Programme Grants Announced

The JISC has announced the availability of up to £840,000 in 2011 e-Content Programme grant funds.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Funding of up to £840,000 is available within two strands:

Strand A–Enriching via Collaboration
Using collaboration to cluster, repackage and re-present existing digital content.
Total funding available £400,000. Up to 5 projects will be funded. Maximum funding for any one project is £100,000

Strand B–Developing Community Content
To develop new content and communities for educational and social purposes.
Total funding available £440,000. Up to 6 projects will be funded. Maximum funding for any one project is £100,000,

The deadline for receipt of proposals in response to this call is 12:00 noon UK time on Friday 10 December 2010. Projects should start by 1 March 2011 and may run for up to 7 months. All projects must be complete by 30 September 2011.

Read more about it at "Grant Funding 11/10: JISC e-Content Programme."

Guidelines for Sparks! Ignition Grants for Libraries and Museums Issued

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has released Sparks! Ignition Grants for Libraries and Museums guidelines.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

This new grant program will provide one-year grants of $10,000 to $25,000 for innovative projects that respond to the challenges and opportunities facing cultural heritage institutions in a rapidly changing information environment. The submission deadline is November 15, 2010.

Successful proposals will address problems, challenges, or needs of broad relevance to museums, libraries, or archives, will test innovative responses to these problems, and will make the findings of these tests widely and openly accessible. Grant funding may include all activities associated with planning, deploying, and evaluating the innovation, as long as the expenses are allowable under federal and IMLS guidelines. Examples of projects that might be funded by this program include, but are not limited to:

exploring the potential of highly original, experimental collaborations,

implementing new workflows or processes with potential for substantial cost savings,

testing new metrics or methods to measure the impact of promising tools or services,

rapid prototyping and testing of new types of software tools, or creating useful new ways to link separate software applications used in libraries, archives, or museums,

offering innovative new types of services or service options to museum, library, or archive visitors, or

enhancing institutions’ abilities to interact with audiences in new ways to promote learning or improve services, such as through the deployment of innovative crowd-sourcing techniques.

Sparks! Ignition Grant funds may not be used for:

evaluation of an existing program or service,

projects that are only for planning or research (as distinguished from experimentation),

projects that are limited to existing and traditional approaches to exhibitions, performances, or other types of public programs,

projects that involve mainly digitization, unless the applicant is proposing an innovative method for digitization,

activities that will produce only incremental improvements in operational or business processes,

support of conferences or professional meetings, or

acquisition of equipment in excess of 50 percent of the total funds requested from IMLS.

Summary Findings of NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants (2007–2010)

The Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities has released Summary Findings of NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants (2007–2010) .

Here's an excerpt:

The bulk of this summary report reflects work done by the NEH's Kathy Toavs who got in touch with 51 of the project directors from the first two years of the program (2007 and 2008). We chose just the first two years because we wanted to talk to project directors who had concluded their work to find out more about outcomes. Kathy provides an overview of her research including a thorough discussion of the many publications, conferences, Web sites, and software tools that emerged from the first two years of the SUG program [Start-Up Grant program]. She also asked the project directors for their feedback on the program and Kathy provides an excellent summary of their thoughts.

"Developing a Generalized and Sustainable Framework for a Public, Open, Scholarly Assessment Service Based on Aggregated Large-Scale Usage Data" Grant Award

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Indiana University Bloomington and NISO a $349,000 grant for "Developing a Generalized and Sustainable Framework for a Public, Open, Scholarly Assessment Service Based on Aggregated Large-Scale Usage Data."

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing associate professor Johan Bollen and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) will share the Mellon Foundation grant designed to build upon the Metrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources (MESUR) project that Bollen began in 2006 with earlier support from the foundation. Bollen is also a member of the IU School of Informatics and Computing's Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS) and the IU Cognitive Science Program faculty. "We are very pleased to receive this generous support from the Mellon Foundation for planning the future of the MESUR project," said Bollen, the project's principal investigator. "The initial work on MESUR received a great deal of positive attention. We believe that there is tremendous potential in this area of research for improving the availability, rapidity and quality of scholarly assessment and this grant will help enhance the impact of MESUR and place it on a path toward viability as a public resource."

The new funding for "Developing a Generalized and Sustainable Framework for a Public, Open, Scholarly Assessment Service Based on Aggregated Large-scale Usage Data," will support the evolution of the MESUR project to a community-supported, sustainable scholarly assessment framework. MESUR has already created a database of more than 1 billion usage events with related bibliographic, citation and usage data for scholarly content.

The project will focus on four areas in developing the sustainability model—financial sustainability, legal frameworks for protecting data privacy, technical infrastructure and data exchange, and scholarly impact—and then integrate the four areas to provide the MESUR project with a framework upon which to build a sustainable structure for deriving valid metrics for assessing scholarly impact based on usage data. Simultaneously, MESUR's ongoing operations will be continued with the grant funding and expanded to ingest additional data and update its present set of scholarly impact indicators.

"This is a tremendous opportunity to serve the community and we are pleased to be partnering with Dr. Bollen on this project," said Todd Carpenter, managing director of NISO and co-principal investigator. "The project will require the coordinated and engaged participation of the full spectrum of stakeholders in scholarly communications and NISO is uniquely positioned to act as a neutral third party in bringing together these parties to obtain consensus and a successful outcome."

NEH Awards New Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants

The NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants program has made 28 new awards.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

American University — Washington, DC
The Map of Jazz Musicians: an online interactive tool for navigating jazz history's interpersonal network
Fernando Benadon, Project Director
Outright: $49,777
To support: The development of an online tool to map connections and collaborations among American jazz musicians.

Bank Street College of Education — New York, NY
Civil Rights Movement Remix (CRM-Remix)
Bernadette Anand, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: A series of workshops to plan the development of location-based smartphone applications about the African-American Civil Rights Movement based around sites in Harlem, NY.

Boston University — Boston, MA
Evolutionary Subject Tagging in the Humanities
Jack Ammerman, Project Director
Outright: $13,767
To support: A two-day meeting of humanities scholars, librarians, and computational analysis experts to consider how to improve existing cataloging software that attempts to better classify interdisciplinary humanities research.

Brown University — Providence, RI
A Journal-Driven Bibliography of Digital Humanities
Julia Flanders, Project Director
Outright: $49,659
To support: Development of a project led by the staff of Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) to create, manage, export, and publish high quality bibliographical data across the digital humanities research domain.

Center for Civic Education — Calabasas, CA
Project Citizen CaseBase: Strengthening Youth Voices in an Open-Source Democracy
Kaavya Krishna, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of a free online multimedia "dashboard" and database to enable sharing community activities and civic engagement programs that promote education in democracy for young people in more than 65 countries.

Columbia University — New York, NY
Leveraging "The Wisdom of the Crowds" for Efficient Tagging and Retrieval of documents from the Historic Newspaper Archive
Haimonti Dutta, Project Director
Outright: $49,452
To support: A study of user-generated subject tagging to improve search capabilities for large-scale digital archives of humanities materials, using the historic newspaper collections of the New York Public Library.

Dartmouth College — Hanover, NH
Mapping the History of Knowledge: Text-Based Tools and Algorithms for Tracking the Development of Concepts
Mikhail Gronas, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Text analysis of 15 editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica employing natural language processing, network analysis, and information visualization in order test computational methods for tracing changes in formation and evolution of concepts and ideas across domains of knowledge over time.

George Mason University — Fairfax, VA
Scholar Press
Daniel Cohen, Project Director
Outright: $49,697
To support: The development of three tools that will aid in the dissemination of research and teaching materials for humanities scholars.

Illinois State University — Normal, IL
Building a Better Back-End: Editor, Author, & Reader Tools for Scholarly Multimedia
Cheryl Ball, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of an open source editorial management system and reader tools for online publication of scholarly multimedia and related forms of digital scholarship for use with Open Journal System (OJS), a widely used editorial management system.

Indiana University, Bloomington — Bloomington, IN
Optical Music Recognition on the International Music Score Library Project
Christopher Raphael, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of a prototype optical music recognition (OMR) software application and editorial platform to allow greater scholarly access to digitized music archives.

John Woodman Higgins Armory Museum, Inc. — Worcester, MA
Virtual Joust: A Technological Interpretation of Medieval Jousting and Its Culture
Jeffery Forgeng, Project Director
Outright: $49,960
To support: The development of an interactive museum exhibition that uses game technology to engage visitors of the John Woodman Higgins Armory Museum in the history of medieval jousting.

Kent State University Main Campus — Kent, OH
The GeoHistorian Project
Mark van't Hooft, Project Director
Outright: $49,749
To support: Educating K-12 teachers and students in the creation of local history content linked to community locations by QR codes (2-dimensional bar codes).

Lewis and Clark College — Portland, OR
Intellectual Property and International Collaboration in the Digital Humanities: the Moroccan Jewish Community Archives
Oren Kosansky, Project Director
Outright: $49,950
To support: The development of a pilot website that provides interactive access to a translated, annotated, and searchable set of 50 to 75 documents of 19th and 20th century Moroccan Jewish materials. The project also will seek to create protocols and best practices for intellectual property issues for digital archival projects in developing countries.

Lower Eastside Girls Club of New York — New York, NY
The Lower Eastside Girls Club Girl/Hood Project
Dave Pentecost, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Develop and test software to create 3D virtual reality performance based on local history of the Lower Eastside neighborhood where the Lower Eastside Girls Club is now located. The project will serve as a model for how humanities projects can take advantage of increasingly popular "fulldome" theaters found in museums across the nation.

Montana Preservation Alliance — Helena, MT
The Touchstone Project: Saving and Sharing Montana's Community Heritage
Kathryn Hampton, Project Director
Outright: $49,146
To support: Development of the Touchstone Project, an interactive online archive of local history and cultural heritage that links local digital repositories to the online Montana Memory Project.

PublicVR — Jamaica Plain, MA
Egyptian Ceremony in the Virtual Temple- Avatars for Virtual Heritage
Jeffrey Jacobson, Project Director
Outright: $49,913
To support: Development of new virtual reality technology for an exhibition on ancient Egypt at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

St. Louis University — Saint Louis, MO
The T-PEN Tool: Sustainability and Quality Control in Encoding Handwritten Texts
James Ginther, Project Director
Outright: $49,708
To support: Creation of a generalized transcription tool coupled with automated mark-up techniques, based on a prototype developed for the Electronic Norman Anonymous Project (ENAP) and refined using data generated from the NEH-funded Carolingian Canon Law Project.

University of California, Riverside — Riverside, CA
The Early California Cultural Atlas
Steven Hackel, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of a digital atlas to integrate and manage historical resources and enable analysis of historical data related to the colonization and settlement of early California.

University of California, San Diego — La Jolla, CA
DRAMA IN THE DELTA: Digitally Reenacting Civil Rights Performances at Arkansas' Wartime Camps for Japanese Americans
Emily Roxworthy, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: A scholarly, historic simulation meant for public audiences exploring the racial dynamics of a wartime internment camp in the Arkansas Delta.

University of Chicago — Chicago, IL
Cinemetrics, a Digital Laboratory for Film Studies
Yuri Tsivian, Project Director
Outright: $45,711
To support: An online collection of tools that would allow film researchers to collect, store, and process scholarly data about film editing.

University of Georgia — Athens, GA
AI for Architectural Discourse
Stefaan Van Liefferinge, Project Director
Outright: $24,965
To support: The creation of an ontology for architectural history to support humanities research that takes advantage of artificial intelligence technologies.

University of Maryland, College Park — College Park, MD
Professionalization in Digital Humanities Centers
Tanya Clement, Project Director
Outright: $24,999
To support: A two-day workshop and online discussion resulting in recommendations for establishing professional standards for evaluating scholarship developed at digital humanities centers.

University of Maryland, College Park — College Park, MD
MITH API Workshop
David Lester, Project Director
Outright: $24,930
To support: A two-day workshop on the use of Application Programming Interfaces to explore approaches that allow for greater sharing of content among humanities resources such as scholarly editions, digitized newspapers, and dictionaries.

University of North Texas — Denton, TX
Mapping Historical Texts: Combining Text-mining & Geo-visualization to Unlock the Research Potential of Historical Newspapers
Andrew Torget, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of text-mining and visualization tools to study movement of information through time and space by analyzing digitized texts of historical newspapers from the NEH-funded Chronicling America archive.

University of Oregon, Eugene — Eugene, OR
Oregon Petrarch Open Book
Massimo Lollini, Project Director
Outright: $49,978
To support: Development of a more interactive database driven website for the Oregon Petrarch Open Book project.

University of Richmond — Richmond, VA
Landscapes of the American Past: Visualizing Emancipation
Edward Ayers, Project Director
Outright: $48,155
To support: The development of a digital atlas seeking to demonstrate how the spread of emancipation of enslaved people occurred during the US Civil War.

University of South Carolina Research Foundation — Columbia, SC
BRAILLESC.ORG
George Williams, Project Director
Outright: $24,987
To support: The collection of additional oral histories, the preparation of pedagogical materials, and further development of additional accessibility features to a humanities website to allow for enhanced visitor experiences for visually-impaired users.

University of Washington — Seattle, WA
Collecting Online Music Project
Ann Lally, Project Director
Outright: $18,881
To support: A planning meeting to discuss issues and possible solutions pertaining to the curation and preservation of born-digital music.

NSF Program Solicitation: Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections

The NSF has issued a program solicitation for Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections. Total amount available across all awards: $10,000,000. Full proposal deadline: December 10, 2010.

Here's an excerpt:

This program seeks to create a national resource of digital data documenting existing biological collections and to advance scientific knowledge by improving access to digitized information (including images) residing in vouchered scientific collections across the United States. The information associated with various collections of organisms, such as geographic distribution, environmental habitat data, phenology, information about associated organisms, collector field notes, tissues and molecular data extracted from the specimens, etc. is a rich resource for providing the baseline from which to further biodiversity research and provide critical information about existing gaps in our knowledge of life on earth. The national resource will be structured at three levels: a national hub, thematic networks based on collaborative groups of collections, and the physical collections. This resource will build upon a sizable existing national investment in curation of the physical objects in scientific collections and contribute vitally to scientific research and technology interests in the United States. It will be an invaluable tool in understanding the biodiversity and societal consequences of climate change, species invasions, natural disasters, the spread of disease vectors and agricultural pests, and other biological issues.

Google Makes 12 Digital Humanities Research Awards

Google has funded 12 grants in its Digital Humanities Research Awards program.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement :

We've given awards to 12 projects led by 23 researchers at 15 universities:

Steven Abney and Terry Szymanski, University of Michigan. Automatic Identification and Extraction of Structured Linguistic Passages in Texts.

Elton Barker, The Open University, Eric C. Kansa, University of California-Berkeley, Leif Isaksen, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus.

Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs, George Mason University. Reframing the Victorians.

Gregory R. Crane, Tufts University. Classics in Google Books.

Miles Efron, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois. Meeting the Challenge of Language Change in Text Retrieval with Machine Translation Techniques.

Brian Geiger, University of California-Riverside, Benjamin Pauley, Eastern Connecticut State University. Early Modern Books Metadata in Google Books.

David Mimno and David Blei, Princeton University. The Open Encyclopedia of Classical Sites.

Alfonso Moreno, Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Bibliotheca Academica Translationum: link to Google Books.

Todd Presner, David Shepard, Chris Johanson, James Lee, University of California-Los Angeles. Hypercities Geo-Scribe.

Amelia del Rosario Sanz-Cabrerizo and José Luis Sierra-Rodríguez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Collaborative Annotation of Digitalized Literary Texts.

Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia. JUXTA Collation Tool for the Web.

Timothy R. Tangherlini, University of California-Los Angeles, Peter Leonard, University of Washington. Northern Insights: Tools & Techniques for Automated Literary Analysis, Based on the Scandinavian Corpus in Google Books.

JISC Call for Proposals for Impact & Embedding of Digitised Resources Grants

JISC has issued a call for proposals for e-Content and Digitisation Programme Impact & Embedding of Digitised Resources grants (maximum funding a project is £40,000).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The JISC invites institutions to submit funding proposals for projects to be funded through its e-Content and Digitisation Programme to address the impact and embedding of digitised resources. The purpose of this call is twofold:

Firstly, to facilitate institutions in carrying out an analysis of the impact of their digitised resources/collections that have been live for at least one calendar year

To develop strategies and practical solutions to ensure the increased use and impact of the resources in teaching, learning and research within higher education

University of Virginia Library Gets $870,000 Grant for Born-Digital Materials Preservation Study

The University of Virginia Library has been awarded a $870,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to study how born-digital materials can be best preserved.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"Born-digital" materials include the works of contemporary writers and architects, as well as archives of current political figures and organizations. These materials are quickly becoming significant collections that require careful, planned stewardship to ensure their preservation and availability to scholars now and in the future, said Martha Sites, an associate University librarian and a principal investigator for the grant.

Programmers and archivists from U. Va. are working with counterparts at Stanford and Yale universities, as well as from England's University of Hull, to create a model for digital collection management that can be easily shared among research libraries and other institutions charged with preserving rare materials. . . .

The universities plan to use 13 "born-digital" collections as their test base for the project. Examples from the U.Va. Library include "papers" that are actually correspondence, drafts and other materials in digital form from former Virginia Sen. John Warner and from author and critic Alan Cheuse, who is also a book reviewer for National Public Radio, creative writing professor at George Mason University and a former U.Va. English professor. The results will make these collections accessible to researchers for the first time.

The grant also provides for four digital archivists and a programmer who will explore and test how to process, preserve and deliver different digital collections across multiple institutions. The common approaches devised to archive born-digital "papers" will not only be designed to be used by different institutions, but they will also be demonstrated and proven in practice by the four partner universities. The work will include the creation of Web-based tools and services to let librarians, archivists and eventually users themselves describe, link, preserve and deliver digital information.

NEH Preservation and Access Research and Development Grants Available

The National Endowment for the Humanities' Division of Preservation and Access is accepting applications for Preservation and Access Research and Development grants, with the maximum grant award being $350,000 for up to three years.

Here's an excerpt:

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. . . .

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 and slow the deterioration of humanities collections through the use of sustainable preservation strategies.

NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants Awards Announced

The NEH Office of Digital Humanities has announced recent awards from its Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants program.

The awards are:

City of Philadelphia, Department of Records—Philadelphia, PA: Historic Overlays on Smart Phones
Early Manuscripts Electronic Library—Rolling Hills Estates, CA: The Nyangwe Diary of David Livingstone: Restoring the Text
George Mason University—Fairfax, VA: Crowdsourcing Documentary Transcription: an Open Source Tool
Georgia Tech Research Corporation—Atlanta, GA: Gesture, Rhetoric, and Digital Storytelling
Pennsylvania State University, Main Campus—University Park, PA: Learning as Playing: An Animated, Interactive Archive of 17th-19th Century Narrative Media For and By Children
Sweet Briar College—Sweet Briar, VA: African-American Families Database: Community Formation in Albemarle County, Virginia, 1850-1880
University of Arizona—Tucson, AZ: Poetry Audio/Video Library Phase 2
University of California, Berkeley—Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Prosopography Services: Building Research Communities and Restoring Ancient Communities through Digital Tools
University of California, Los Angeles—Los Angeles, CA: Software Interface for Real-time Exploration of Three-Dimensional Computer Models of Historic Urban Environments
University of California, San Diego—La Jolla, CA: Interactive Visualization of Media Collections for Humanities Research
University of Chicago—Chicago, IL: Dictionnaire Vivant de la Langue Francaise (DVLF): Expanding the French Dictionary
University of Georgia Research Foundation, Inc.—Athens, GA: Telecollaborative Webcasting:Strengthening Acquisition of Humanities Content Knowledge through Foreign Language Education
University of Nebraska, Board of Regents—Lincoln, NE: Sustaining Digital History
University of New Mexico—Albuquerque, NM: Digital Documentation and Reconstruction of an Ancient Maya Temple and Prototype of Internet GIS Database of Maya Architecture
University of Virginia—Charlottesville, VA: ARTeFACT Movement Thesaurus
University of Virginia—Charlottesville, VA: New Digital Tools for Restoring Polychromy to 3D Digital Models of Sculpture
University of Virginia—Charlottesville, VA: Supercomputing for Digitized 3D Models of Cultural Heritage
Washington State University—Pullman, WA: Mukurtu: An Indigenous Archive and Publishing Tool

University of Tennessee, Knoxville Gets IMLS Grant to Study Value of Academic Libraries

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville School of Information Sciences has been awarded an IMLS grant to study the value of academic libraries. It will collaborate with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Libraries and the Association of Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt from the press release :

Carol Tenopir, a professor in the School of Information Sciences, is the lead investigator on the project; Paula Kaufman, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a co-principal investigator; and Martha Kyrillidou, Senior Director for Statistics and Service Quality Programs, is leading the project from ARL.

The three-year grant, entitled "Value, Outcomes, and Return on Investment of Academic Libraries (Lib-Value)," will work to enrich, expand, test, and implement methodologies measuring the return on investment (ROI) in academic libraries.

"There is an increasing need for academic librarians to demonstrate the return on investment and value of the library to the various stakeholders of the institution and to guide library management in the redirection of library funds to important products and services for the future," Tenopir said. Academic libraries actively participate in the many changes in scholarship, such as the move to e-science, collaborative and participatory scholarship, and focus on new materials such as data, multimedia, and born-digital assets. To remain relevant and central to the academic mission in the future, academic librarians need to be able to demonstrate the value that the academic library provides to the campus community using proven methods of measurement that will allow librarians to determine where their efforts should be concentrated and how funding should be allocated.

The results of the study will provide evidence and a set of tested methodologies and tools to help academic librarians demonstrate how the library provides value to its constituents and ROI to its funders, and to measure which products and services are of most value to enhancing the university’s mission. This project will greatly expand upon earlier studies to consider multiple measures of value that the academic library brings to teaching/learning, research, and social/professional/public engagement functions of the academic institution.

To ensure that the process will be rigorous, realistic, and highly visible in the academic library and university community, an experienced team of academic librarians and outstanding researchers bring their leadership, built on many years of experience, to the project. Two well-known researchers in the library field will serve as consultants: Bruce Kingma, an economist at Syracuse University, and Donald W. King, a statistician at the University of North Carolina at Chapel-Hill. Additional project participants include: Gayle Baker, Ken Wise, Rachel Fleming-May, Regina Mays, Crystal Sherline, and Andrea Baer at the University of Tennessee; Tina Chrzastowski at the University of Illinois; and Henry Gross, Gary Roebuck, and David Green at ARL.

Indiana University Gets $2.38 Million Grant from Mellon Foundation for Kuali OLE

Indiana University has been awarded a $2.38 Million Grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Kuali OLE (Open Library Environment) project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

IU will lead the Kuali OLE (Open Library Environment) project, a partnership of research libraries dedicated to managing increasingly digital resources and collections. Together, these libraries will develop "community source" software that will be made available to libraries worldwide.

Kuali OLE (pronounced Oh-LAY) partners include Indiana University; Florida Consortium (University of Florida representing Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, Rollins College, University of Central Florida, University of Miami, University of South Florida and the Florida Center for Library Automation); Lehigh University; Triangle Research Libraries Network (represented by Duke University and North Carolina State University); University of Chicago; University of Maryland; University of Michigan; and the University of Pennsylvania.

Large academic research libraries such as these manage and provide access to millions of items, using software to track interrelated transactions that range from ordering and paying for items to loaning materials to library patrons.

As the nature of library collections expands to include more digital materials—including leased electronic journals and digitized photograph collections—libraries are increasingly interested in developing management software for these resources, said Interim Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries Carolyn Walters.

"Libraries now create, lease and share digital materials, but the systems in place for cataloging and tracking these items are based on print collections," said Walters. "With this project, we benefit from working together with a community of academic libraries that want to change the way that information is managed in the scholarly environment."

"Research libraries are in dire need of systems that can support the management of research collections for the next-generation scholar," said Robert H. McDonald, executive director for the project and IU's associate dean for library technologies. "This approach demonstrates the best of open-source software development, directed partnership resource needs, and a market of commercial support providers to truly align with the needs of research libraries within the higher education environment."

More than 200 libraries, educational institutions, professional organizations and businesses laid the groundwork for the Kuali OLE project by participating in the original OLE project, a design phase that was supported by an earlier grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and led by Duke University.

Revised NSF Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure Solicitation

The NSF has issued a revised solicitation for Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure grants (NSF 10-508). It is anticipated that $15,000,000 over a three-year period will be available for 25 to 30 awards. The full proposal deadline is February 26, 2010.

Here's an excerpt:

The FY2010 SDCI solicitation supports the development, deployment, and maintenance of software in the five software focus area listed above, i.e., software for HPC systems, software for digital data management, software for networking, middleware, and cybersecurity, and specifically focuses on cross-cutting issues of CI software sustainability, manageability and power/energy efficiency in each of these software focus areas. . . .

Software for Digital Data

The Data focus area addresses software that promotes acquisition, transport, discovery, access, analysis, and preservation of very large-scale digital data in support of large scale applications or data sets transitioning to use by communities other than the ones that originally gathered the data. Examples of such datasets includes climatologic, ecologic, phonologic, observation data, sensor systems, spatial visualizations, multi-dimensional datasets correlated with metadata and so forth.

Specific focus areas in Software for Digital Data for the FY2010 SDCI solicitation include:

Documentation/Metadata: Tools for automated/facilitated metadata creation/acquisition, including linking data and metadata to assist in curation efforts; tools to enable the creation and application of ontologies, semantic discovery, assessment, comparison, and integration of new composite ontologies.

Security/Protection: Tools for data authentication, tiered/layered access systems for data confidentiality/privacy protection, replication tools to ensure data protection across varied storage systems/strategies, rules-based data security management tools, and assurance tools to test for digital forgery and privacy violations.

Data transport/management: Tools to enable acquisition of high data rate high volume data from varied, distributed data sources (including sensors systems and instruments), while addressing stringent space and data quality constraints; tools to assist in improved low-level management of data and transport to take better advantage of limited bandwidth.

Data analytics and visualization: Tools that operate in (near) real-time, not traditional batch mode, on possible streaming data, in-transit data processing, data integration and fusion.

Digging into Data Challenge Projects Funded

JISC has announced that eight projects have been awarded Digging into Data Challenge grants.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"Data mining and analysis are not just for scientists" is the message coming strongly out of an international JISC-funded competition, the "Digging into Data Challenge."

Entrants have been challenged to answer the question "what would you do with a million books? Or a million pages of newspapers? Or a million photographs of artworks?" That is, how can analysis done over immense quantities of digital data be employed in humanities and social science research? What would you do with a million books? Or a million pages of newspapers? Or a million photographs of artworks?

Eight international research teams from the UK, US and Canada will be using a variety of data analysis tools to demonstrate that techniques currently used in the sciences can leverage open, new avenues for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

The winners of the competition are announced today by the four leading research agencies sponsoring the competition: JISC, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), both of the United States.

Investment from the four agencies together amounts to over a million pounds, allowing new links to be forged across the different countries, as well as breaking down disciplinary boundaries.

Here are the funded projects

Data Mining with Criminal Intent: George Mason University, University of Alberta, and University of Hertfordshire
Digging into Image Data to Answer Authorship Related Questions: Michigan State University, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and University of Sheffield
Digging into the Enlightenment: Mapping the Republic of Letters: University of Oklahoma, University of Oxford, and Stanford University
Harvesting Speech Datasets for Linguistic Research on the Web: McGill University and Cornell University
Mining a Year of Speech: University of Oxford and University of Pennsylvania
Railroads and the Making of Modern America—Tools for Spatio-Temporal Correlation, Analysis, and Visualization: University of Portsmouth and University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, University of Southampton, and McGill University
Towards Dynamic Variorum Editions: Mount Allison University, Imperial College, London, and Tufts University