The University of North Texas has received over $800,000 in two Institute of Museum and Library Services grants related to digital data curation.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The University of North Texas Libraries and UNT's College of Information have received more than $800,000 in grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to address the challenges of curating and preserving digital information and new requirements from the National Science Foundation and other agencies that fund university research on long-term management of research data for possible review and use by future researchers and scholars.

Dr. William Moen, associate dean for research in UNT's College of Information, and Dr. Martin Halbert, dean of the UNT Libraries, successfully applied for two grants from IMLS' Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, which supports efforts to recruit and educate the next generation of librarians and faculty members who prepare them for future careers, as well as supporting research related to library education and staffing needs, curriculum development and continuing education and training. . . .

The first grant of $624,663 from IMLS is for a three-year project to create four graduate-level courses in digital curation and data management. The first two courses will be taught during the summer of 2012. All four courses will be taught beginning in the summer of 2013, said Moen, the principal investigator for the grant. . . .

The second IMLS grant of $226,786 will fund a two-year investigation of the new roles, knowledge and skills that will be required of library and information science professionals to successfully manage research data cited in articles in scholarly journals — not just the publications.

UNT researchers, led by Halbert, will conduct two national surveys of officials at NSF and other funding agencies; college and university vice presidents for research and campus research officers; faculty of library and information science programs; academic librarians; campus IT managers; provosts and chief academic officers; and key researchers at universities and publishers of faculty research. The surveys will focus on college and universities' current data management plans, policies and practices; expectations and beliefs about data management; and preparation needed to archive data.

During the two years of the project, UNT researchers will also conduct focus groups in conjunction with several professional meetings. Personal interviews will be scheduled with selected individuals from the focus groups.

Read more about it at "Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program Grant Announcement June 2011."

| Digital Scholarship |

The National Endowment for the Humanities' Office of Digital Humanities has announced a new grant program—Digital Humanities Implementation Grants.

Here's an excerpt from the guidelines:

This program is designed to fund the implementation of innovative digital-humanities projects that have successfully completed a start-up phase and demonstrated their value to the field. Such projects might enhance our understanding of central problems in the humanities, raise new questions in the humanities, or develop new digital applications and approaches for use in the humanities. The program can support innovative digital-humanities projects that address multiple audiences, including scholars, teachers, librarians, and the public. Applications from recipients of NEH's Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants are welcome.

Unlike NEH's start-up grant program, which emphasizes basic research, prototyping, experimentation, and potential impact, the Digital Humanities Implementation Grants program seeks to identify projects that have successfully completed their start-up phase and are well positioned to have a major impact.

Proposals are welcome for digital initiatives in any area of the humanities. Digital Humanities Implementation Grants may involve:

• implementation of computationally-based methods or techniques for humanities research;
• implementation of new digital tools for use in humanities research, public programming, or educational settings;
• efforts to ensure the completion and long-term sustainability of existing digital resources (typically in conjunction with a library or archive);
• studies that examine the philosophical or practical implications of the use of emerging technologies in specific fields or disciplines of the humanities, or in interdisciplinary collaborations involving several fields or disciplines; or
• implementation of new digital modes of scholarly communication that facilitate peer review, collaboration, or the dissemination of humanities scholarship for various audiences.

| Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 | Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography | Google Books Bibliography | Institutional Repository Bibliography | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |

The JISC Managing Research Data Programme has issued a call for grant proposals.

Here's an excerpt from the notice:

A total of approximately £4.6M will be available, divided across three strands. The deadline for submissions will be 28 July 2011. . . .

The strands are as follows:

Strand A: Institutional Research Data Management Infrastructure: divided between A(1) Start-up projects to help institutions that are at an early stage of developing a research data management infrastructure; and A(2) Embedding projects to help institutions enhance and extend an existing pilot research data management infrastructure. . . .

Strand B: Research Data Management Planning: projects to design and implement research data management plans for specific projects/departments; including supporting systems and tools. . . .

Strand C: Projects to develop and implement institutional data management planning tools/workflows.

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

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

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

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

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

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

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

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

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

Here's the announcement:

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

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

Here's an excerpt from the announcement.

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

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

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

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

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

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

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

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

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

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

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