IMLS Awards More Than $12 Million Dollars in National Leadership Grants

From the Institute For Museum and Library Services:

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) today announced 52 National Leadership Grants totaling $12,065,054. The institutions receiving the awards are matching them with $9,759,281 in non-federal funds. IMLS received 211 applications requesting $47,635,924.
“We believe that each of these grants will advance the museum, library, and archive professions through new research and the creation and dissemination of innovative tools, models, and activities that can be shared broadly,” said IMLS Director Susan Hildreth.” Of particular note, IMLS is investing $1,957,773 in projects that support the Campaign for Grade Level Reading, including efforts to increase school readiness and prevent summer learning loss.”

Complete List of Leadership Grants (September 2012)
Titles of A Few of the 52 Funded Projects:
+ University of California, California Digital Library – Oakland, CA
Award Amount: $149,070; Matching Amount: $34,928

The California Digital Library will leverage the early success of its new Data Management Planning Tool (DMPTool) to continue developing a cohesive set of resources that help academic libraries promote and provide better data management planning services for their campuses. DMPTool users include researchers, librarians, and administrators such as grant officers. Because data management practices and norms are still evolving, the project work plan includes significant information-sharing and feedback strategies with key stakeholder groups. The project team also will explore greater integration of the DMPTool with other research and data management workflow tools.

Peninsula Library System – San Mateo, CA
Award Amount: $333,391; Matching Amount: $525,314

The Peninsula Library System will lead the California Audio-Visual Preservation Project (CAVPP), a two-year statewide collaborative effort by at least thirty-six libraries, museums, and archives, to preserve and provide online access to the state’s endangered, historically significant, audiovisual recordings. CAVPP will produce training materials and guidelines to help all participating organizations through a preservation planning process. The project will bring to light hidden media collections via the Internet Archive the Online Archive of California.

University of California, Santa Cruz, University Library – Santa Cruz, CA
Award Amount: $400,000; Matching Amount: $1,023,407

The University of California, Santa Cruz Library will partner with the Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University to develop and test a new “curator dashboard” plug-in for the Omeka web-publishing system for digital collections. The partners will produce a suite of workflows and tools that help educators, scholars, and library and museum staff build, describe, manage, and prepare digital collections for deposit in digital preservation storage repositories.

University of Illinois – Champaign, IL
Award Amount: $499,919; Matching Amount: $219,951

Researchers at the University of Illinois’ Graduate School of Library and Information Science and the Johns Hopkins University Libraries will use this grant to better understand the motivations, needs, priorities, and workflows of small scientific research environments. Many libraries and data repositories are developing new services to support scientific data management planning and data preservation. But not all scientists have access to such services, particularly in “small science” research sites, and the libraries that provide such services cannot effectively identify and curate all worthy data. Findings from this research will be used to develop and test a Site Based Data Curation Framework of recommended policies and processes that promote productive and successful relationships between scientific research teams, libraries,and data repositories.

American Library Association – Chicago, IL
Award Amount: $486,587; Matching Amount: $284,438

The American Library Association and the University of Maryland, in partnership with the International City/County Management Association, will conduct a three-year study of public libraries as providers of digitally inclusive services and resources. Digital literacy and digital inclusion are becoming increasingly important aspects of individual and community success. This study will generate new understanding of the roles public libraries are playing, and gaps or needs that must be addressed to help libraries fulfill their vision of equitable access for all. Building on the methods of the long-running Public Library Funding & Technology Access Study, this new investigation will provide useful new data for public policy decision makers and funders.

Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, Saint John’s University – Collegeville, MN
Award Amount: $350,930; Matching Amount: $533,442

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML), a sponsored program of Saint John’s University, will lead a team of collaborators drawn from St. Louis University, the University of Kentucky, and other organizations to build vHMML, a new integrated online environment for the discovery and use of digitized manuscripts, and collaborative scholarship among students and scholars in the manuscript studies and paleography fields. A library of introductory texts to the field and a glossary of terms used in manuscript studies will help make vHMML more easily accessible to interested non-experts. The project will explore new models of collaboration between technical experts, scholars, archivists and librarians, and students in building a research community’s new online collaboration and learning space.

Montana State University – Bozeman, MT
Award Amount: $47,952; Matching Amount: $18,000

There is little economic research investigating the impacts of patrons’ Internet access—both in the library and at home—on the changing use and availability of traditional library resources. Researchers at Montana State University and the American Library Association will explore the feasibility of an economic study of the Internet’s impacts on public libraries. The planning project team will design and test a research questionnaire to see if it can elicit information that would be used to effectively model and quantify these economic impacts and provide insights into appropriate changes in public library operations.

Syracuse University, School of Information Studies – Syracuse, NY
Award Amount: $150,000; Matching Amount: $51,895

Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies will partner with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Education Arcade and the American Library Association to plan, develop, and test an Alternate Reality Game Toolkit that could be used by libraries to create engaging game-based learning exercises. The toolkit’s framework will permit libraries to insert their own local content and resources and customize the game experience and learning objectives to meet their own local needs without having to build the entire educational game from the ground up. The project will focus initially on academic libraries and functionality that best supports educators and students at the college undergraduate level, but future work may extend to other types of libraries and target audiences.

University of Tennessee – Knoxville, TN
Award Amount: $49,938; Matching Amount: $18,732

Librarians and digital humanities faculty at the University of Tennessee and the University of Illinois will partner in a planning grant to explore the feasibility of an online index, and possibly a full-text repository, of individual poetry works published only in electronic format. The project team will consider a variety of issues ranging from technical and intellectual property issues, to discovery and use rights, licensing schema, and strategies for sustaining such a resource. A final report will be widely disseminated detailing findings and recommendations for future action.

Direct to Complete List of All Grants (September 2012)

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