IMLS Awards More than $14.6 Million in Federal Grants to U.S. Libraries

Projects in 27 states and the District of Columbia received IMLS funding.
After the news release (below) which highlights a few of the grants awarded today we’ve also point out a few more (of many) projects that received funding today. You’ll also find a link to access the full list of 2013 grants from IMLS.
From IMLS:

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) today announced grants for 42 library projects totaling $14,670,662.
The projects were selected from more than 285 applications requesting a total of $37,977,530 and were awarded through three IMLS programs: the Native American Library Services Enhancement program, the Laura Bush 21 st Century Librarian Program, and the National Leadership Grants for Libraries program.Grantees are matching these awards with a total of $10,546,376 in non-federal funds.
“Libraries of all types are anchors for their communities. Whether an academic library serving a university, a Native American library serving a reservation, or a local library serving residents, communities rely on these trusted institutions for information they want and need,” said IMLS Director Susan Hildreth. “With these federal investments, libraries will be able to address challenges that face the library field, boost their professional workforce with training and education, and better meet the needs of their communities with improved programs and services.”
The Native American Library Services Enhancement grants are competitive grants to federally recognized tribes to expand services for learning, access to information, and partnership. The Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grants fund projects designed to address the education and training needs of library professionals. National Leadership Grants for Libraries support projects that improve professional practice beyond the grantee institution.
Grantees are planning a variety of projects and initiatives, including the following:

• The American Library Association will research the effect of early literacy library programming on parent behavior and engagement.
• Award: $499,741

• A tribal library will offer six hands-on genealogy workshops, making it possible for participants to explore their family histories with historic photographs and documents and share family stories and oral traditions with tribal members.
• Awarded to: Stockbridge-Munsee Community – Bowler, WI
  Total Grant: $112,251 

• Two university libraries will collaborate with a Chinese library to test the use of Machine Translation – technology for digital collections.
• Awarded to: U. of North Texas and U. of New Mexico
• Award: $486,078

•  A state school library association will create a distance learning Masters Degree program to prepare school librarians to teach student digital literacy skills.
• Awarded to Old Dominion University
• Award: $322,718 

• A university library will create a plan that would establish a central access point for digital resources in American Sign Language.
• Awarded to: Utah Valley University
• Award: $50,000

• A university library and its partners, building on the free, open-source digital archiving platform called Mukurtu, will provide training and resources to Native American Tribes for planning their digitization and preservation activities.
• Awarded to: Washington St. University Libraries
• Award:  $499,18

Here’s a selected list of 12 more projects that received funding from IMLS today.
This is far from a complete list. 
You can access info about all of the grants on this page.

The University of Washington, in partnership with Project Information Literacy, will conduct a large-scale quantitative study investigating how recent college graduates find, evaluate, and use information for lifelong learning once they leave campus, particularly in areas such as staying competitive in the workforce, engaging in civic affairs, and personal development. From the data collected and analyzed, researchers will study graduates’ information needs and the information systems they employ as lifelong learners. In related analysis, the team will also study the role libraries currently play in lifelong learning as well as opportunities to enhance lifelong learning that are feasible, practical, and affordable.

The University of California Davis University Library will investigate the future of academic research library technical services by assessing the current landscape and developing a roadmap for strategic planning and investments in the coming years. This roadmap can be continuously updated as new data models, standards, workflows, and practices emerge and evolve. Currently, complex workflows and interdependent systems have constrained academic libraries from fully leveraging the benefits and efficiencies of modern technological infrastructures. This research study will include acquisitions, licensing, cataloging, processing, digitization, and newly identified areas that will encourage using technological resources.

The Association of Research Libraries has begun a strategic planning process that frames the critical work of the association and defines the role it plays in higher education. This will allow it to consider opportunities in continuing education and collaborations with other types of institutions, as well as member institution needs. This grant provides funding for design studio work and for regional meetings with member libraries and other stakeholders interested in the future of research libraries. ARL members will review a final planning framework at the association’s spring 2014 Membership Meeting.

Howard University’s Moorland Spingarn Research Center, with project partners, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at New York Public Library, OCLC, the Washington Research Library Consortium, and the Social Networks and Archival Context Project, will develop the “Portal to the Black Experience. This will better support the needs of researchers interested in the cultural heritage of diverse and under-represented communities by providing enhanced metadata, beyond what is traditionally supplied in bibliographic catalogs. As a model, this will demonstrate the potential of new metadata practices and technologies as the means to search across collections held by different institutions.

The Department of Libraries for the Chicago public schools will improve school librarians’ understanding of mobile technologies so that mobile devices can be better supported in school and school library programs. In response to these challenges, the participating schools will produce lesson plans, student artifacts, and technology integration recommendations, which can be used to support implementation at other schools. The project is unique among other technology integration programs due to involvement of school leadership at each site, the creation of standards-based lesson plans by school librarians, and the inclusion of gamifcation features into the program.

The Howard County Library System (HCLS), in partnership with the University of Maryland Baltimore County, will use this grant to enhance the teen digital media lab at the Savage Branch Library by adding science, technology, engineering, and math projects and implementing that same STEM-focused model in three other libraries. The “Hi Tech Academy: The Road to a STEM Career” project will address the increasing demand for workers with STEM-related skills as the number of college graduates in these fields decreases. This program will create a model to be replicated at other libraries, bring awareness of how to best teach these skills, increase interest in STEM for youth, and address the demand for these skills in the community.

The University of Minnesota Libraries will use its grant to create the African American Theater History Project, which will address 200 years of African American theater history that has been consistently under documented. The project team will work with stakeholders to build and make accessible a national collection of digital archival material relevant to African American cultural history, including theater, and to create a means of identifying, aggregating, and indexing selected metadata for end-user discovery. Using existing harvesting protocols or Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), the project will gather openly available metadata and make it available for students and researchers through portals such as the Digital Public Library of America.

The Scripps Library at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center will develop Connecting Presidential Collections (presedentialcollections.org), a centralized portal for audiences to access presidential materials, which are both vast and disparate. Creating a centralized resource addresses the needs of audiences by simplifying discovery and will allow for increased exposure for the collections of presidential sites and libraries. Building on work completed during a planning grant, this next phase of work will include finalizing the website, cataloging materials, growing the number of participating partners, creating training resources, and digitizing microfilm collections. Once populated, this website will be a robust resource for scholars, librarians, researchers, students, and presidential history buffs.

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