SUBSCRIBE
SUBSCRIBE
EXPLORE +
  • About infoDOCKET
  • Academic Libraries on LJ
  • Research on LJ
  • News on LJ
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Libraries
    • Academic Libraries
    • Government Libraries
    • National Libraries
    • Public Libraries
  • Companies (Publishers/Vendors)
    • EBSCO
    • Elsevier
    • Ex Libris
    • Frontiers
    • Gale
    • PLOS
    • Scholastic
  • New Resources
    • Dashboards
    • Data Files
    • Digital Collections
    • Digital Preservation
    • Interactive Tools
    • Maps
    • Other
    • Podcasts
    • Productivity
  • New Research
    • Conference Presentations
    • Journal Articles
    • Lecture
    • New Issue
    • Reports
  • Topics
    • Archives & Special Collections
    • Associations & Organizations
    • Awards
    • Funding
    • Interviews
    • Jobs
    • Management & Leadership
    • News
    • Patrons & Users
    • Preservation
    • Profiles
    • Publishing
    • Roundup
    • Scholarly Communications
      • Open Access

July 6, 2020 by Gary Price

LYRASIS Announces the 2020 Catalyst Fund Recipients and Their Projects

July 6, 2020 by Gary Price

From a LYRASIS Announcement:

LYRASIS is pleased to announce the 2020 recipients of the LYRASIS Catalyst Fund. The Catalyst Fund is an award program that provides support for new ideas and innovative projects from the LYRASIS membership. It is administered by the LYRASIS Leaders Circle to expand opportunities to explore, test, refine and collaborate on innovations with potential for community-wide impact. The LYRASIS Leaders Circle selects the projects that will be funded. This year, five projects and one idea will be funded for the benefit of the community at large. 

Capital for the Catalyst Fund comes from the $1.2 million research, development and innovation budget approved by the LYRASIS Board of Trustees. The program is managed within the new LYRASIS Research and Innovation division headed by Erin Tripp. Through the Catalyst Fund, now in its fourth year, LYRASIS has directly invested more than $500,000 into its members to support and promote scalable innovation. 

The following is the list of the 2020 Catalyst Fund recipients:

  • University of Utah, “Toolkit to Assess OCR’ed Historical Text in the Era of Big Data.” While cultural heritage institutions have been using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract full text from scanned page images, the quality of extracted text is low for historical texts. In this era of big data, such historical texts will be left behind, both in search rankings and their use through computational tools. We propose developing a set of guidelines, and tools that will assist organizations in improving their existing OCRed collections. $30,100. 
  • University of Mississippi, “Caption This: Creating Efficiency in Audiovisual Accessibility Using Artificial Intelligence.” This project will focus on the creation of a successful workflow to use open source code to efficiently produce captions for the native streaming audio and video files in our institutional repository, thereby making A/V materials accessible to all users, in accordance with the University’s accessibility standards. $28,198. 
  • University of Connecticut, “Unlocking the Past: Handwritten Text Recognition for 19th Century Manuscripts.” To develop a foundation for a large-scale, open source software for handwriting recognition for historical documents. $24,277. 
  • University of Illinois at Urbana Champlain, “Preprint Accessibility: Is Early Access to Research Access for All?” To investigate the accessibility of preprint server platforms and files in order to identify accessibility issues and suggest possible remedies. $6,037. 
  • New Jersey State Library, “Increasing Staff Confidence to Implement User Experience and Design Principles in Website Creation.” This project will develop a robust online version of its User Experience (UX) Boot Camp and make it available at no cost to attendees. The course is designed to equip participants with the skills to create vibrant and appealing websites that serve the needs of the public. While the Boot Camp is marketed to public librarians, the curriculum is largely applicable to all members of the LYRASIS community who have any responsibility for a public-facing website. $18,250. 

In addition to these projects, the LYRASIS Leadership team has chosen to fund the idea sbmitted by Yeshiva University, “The Alternatives Project: Tackling Humanities Textbook Costs by Leveraging Library Resources.” This will be planned, coordinated, and implemented by LYRASIS in partnership with Yeshiva. 

Source

Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Awards, Data Files, Libraries, Management and Leadership, News, Open Access, Patrons and Users

SHARE:

About Gary Price

Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.

ADVERTISEMENT

Archives

Job Zone

ADVERTISEMENT

Related Infodocket Posts

Colorado: "Former Weld County Librarian Wins Settlement After District Fired Her For Promoting LGBTQ, Anti-Racism Programs"

From Colorado Public Radio: A former librarian will receive $250,000 from the High Plains Library District as part of a settlement in a lengthy civil rights dispute over her firing. ...

Journal Article: "Video Game Equipment Loss and Durability in a Circulating Academic Collection"

The article linked below was published online today by Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (EBLIP). Title Video Game Equipment Loss and Durability in a Circulating Academic Collection Authors Diane ...

New Report: "Alternative Publishing Platforms. What Have We Learnt?"

From Knowledge Exchange: Different alternative publishing platforms have appeared over recent years. But what are their pros and cons? Do they differ significantly from traditional scholarly journals? To better understand ...

Not Real News: An Associated Press Roundup of Untrue Stories Shared Widely on Social Media This Week

From the Associated Press: A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were ...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is Hosting a Virtual Roundtable on AI and Content Creation on October 4th

From the Federal Trade Commission: The Federal Trade Commission staff will be hosting a virtual roundtable discussion on October 4, 2023 to better understand the impact of the use of ...

Andrea Jackson Gavin Appointed Inaugural Program Director of the HBCU Digital Library Trust

Below is the Full Text of the Announcement Letter (via the Harvard Library): We are delighted to announce the appointment of Andrea Jackson Gavin as the inaugural Program Director of the ...

U.S. Census Releases 2020 Data for Nearly 1,500 Detailed Race and Ethnicity Groups, Tribes and Villages

From the U.S. Census: The U.S. Census Bureau today released 2020 Census population counts and sex-by-age statistics for 300 detailed race and ethnic groups, as well as 1,187 detailed American ...

Book Bans Spike by 33% During the Last School Year, According to New Research by PEN America

From PEN America:  The number of public school book bans across the country increased by 33 percent in the 2022-23 school year compared to the 2021-22 school year, according to ...

Penn State Leads Big Ten Academic Alliance Project on Open Homework Systems; ChatGPT Usage is Rising Again as...

AI ChatGPT Usage is Rising Again as Students Return to School (via Bloomberg) Universities Rethink Using AI Writing Detectors to Vet Students’ Work (via Bloomberg) Amazon AI-Generated Books Force Amazon ...

Alabama: Ozark Library Increases Parental Supervision Requirements But Doesn’t Remove Books

From The Alabama Reflector: The Ozark Dale County Library Board of Trustees Wednesday approved new policies that will require more parental supervision of children in libraries but did not explicitly ...

$800,000 Budget Cut Proposed: West Virginia University Library System Plans to Reduce Staff, Modify Space Amid University Cuts;...

From WCHS: Following the vote to cut 28 majors and more than 100 faculty positions at West Virginia University, the university’s library system could be the next to take the ...

American Library Association (ALA) Releases Preliminary Data on 2023 Book Challenges; Highest Number of Book Challenges Since ALA...

UPDATE LeVar Burton to Lead 2023 Banned Books Week as Honorary Chair (via ALA) —End Update— Below is the full text of a statement released today by the American Library ...

ADVERTISEMENT

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER

Tweets by infoDOCKET

ADVERTISEMENT

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

Primary Sidebar

  • News
  • Reviews+
  • Technology
  • Programs+
  • Design
  • Leadership
  • People
  • COVID-19
  • Advocacy
  • Opinion
  • INFOdocket
  • Job Zone

Reviews+

  • Booklists
  • Prepub Alert
  • Book Pulse
  • Media
  • Readers' Advisory
  • Self-Published Books
  • Review Submissions
  • Review for LJ

Awards

  • Library of the Year
  • Librarian of the Year
  • Movers & Shakers 2022
  • Paralibrarian of the Year
  • Best Small Library
  • Marketer of the Year
  • All Awards Guidelines
  • Community Impact Prize

Resources

  • LJ Index/Star Libraries
  • Research
  • White Papers / Case Studies

Events & PD

  • Online Courses
  • In-Person Events
  • Virtual Events
  • Webcasts
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Advertise
  • Subscribe
  • Media Inquiries
  • Newsletter Sign Up
  • Submit Features/News
  • Data Privacy
  • Terms of Use
  • Terms of Sale
  • FAQs
  • Careers at MSI


© 2023 Library Journal. All rights reserved.


© 2022 Library Journal. All rights reserved.