Tag Archive for: library

Affiliates, take note… grant opportunities

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The Save America’s Treasures program offers grants for preservation and/or conservation work on nationally significant intellectual and cultural artifacts and historic structures and sites. Intellectual and cultural artifacts include objects, collections, documents, sculpture, and works of art. Historic structures and sites include districts, buildings, areas, and structures.

  • Grants are awarded through a competitive matching grant program. The program is administered by the National Park Service. A dollar-for-dollar, non-Federal match is required. The minimum grant request for collections projects is $25,000 Federal share; the minimum grant request for historic property projects is $125,000 Federal share. The maximum grant request for all projects is $700,000 Federal share. The deadline for proposal submission is May 21, 2010.

The Council on Library and Information Resources, an independent, nonprofit organization whose mission is to expand access to information, however recorded and preserved, has opened the pre-proposal application period for its Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant program.

  • The program will award funds to institutions (including historical associations and societies as well as archives, museums, libraries, and other cultural heritage organizations) holding collections of high scholarly value that are difficult or impossible to locate through existing finding aids. Award recipients will create descriptive information for their hidden collections that will be linked to and interoperable with all other projects funded by this grant with the purpose of forming a federated environment that can be built upon over time. Funding for the program comes from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
     
  • CLIR expects to award about $4 million in total grants ranging from $75,000 to $500,000 each. Go to https://www.clir.org/ for complete program information. The deadline is April 23, 2010 for pre-proposals.

The Endangered Language Fund provides grants for language maintenance and linguistic field work. The language involved must be in danger of disappearing within a generation or two. The work most likely to be funded is that which serves both the native community and the field of linguistics. Work which has immediate applicability to one group and more distant application to the other will also be considered. Publishing awards are a low priority, but will be considered.

  • Grants in this round are expected to be less than $4,000 each, and to average about $2,000. Eligible expenses include consultant fees, tapes, films, travel, etc. Overhead is not allowed. Grants are normally for a one-year period. Researchers and language activists from any country are eligible to apply. Awards can be made to institutions, but no administrative costs are covered. For complete details visit www.endangeredlanguagefund.org. The deadline for proposals is April 20.

 The American Sportfishing Association’s FishAmerica Foundation invites proposals for citizen-driven habitat restoration projects under its partnership with the NOAA Community-based Restoration Program.

  • The partnership requests proposals for local efforts to accomplish meaningful on-the-ground restoration of marine, estuarine, and riparian habitats, including salt marshes, seagrass beds, mangrove forests, and freshwater habitats important to anadromous fish species (fish like salmon and striped bass that migrate to and from the sea). Emphasis is on using a hands-on, grassroots approach to restore fisheries habitat across coastal America, the Great Lakes region, and U.S. Territories of the Caribbean.
     
  • A portion of the total available grant funds will be dedicated to projects that further NOAA’s Open Rivers Initiative. These projects must remove dams and other river barriers, in order to benefit living marine and coastal resources, particularly diadromous fish.  
     
  • The funders anticipate the availability of approximately $1 million in total funding; approximately $200,000 of the available funding will be dedicated specifically to projects furthering NOAA’s Open Rivers Initiative. Sub-awards will range between $10,000 and $75,000 per project. The RFP and application are available at the FishAmerica Foundation Web site, www.fishamerica.org.  The proposal deadline is June 7.

Rubin Museum finds rare treasures in Smithsonian library

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Thanks to the Rubin Museum of Art’s curatorial assistant Tracey Friedman for this guest post.  Here, Tracey explains what happened when she came to Washington to research medieval cosmology in the Smithsonian’s Dibner Library for their upcoming exhibit, Visions of the Cosmos.    

Rubin Museum curatorial assistant Tracey Friedman researches medieval cosmology at Smithsonian Library.

Rubin Museum curatorial assistant Tracey Friedman researches medieval cosmology at the Smithsonian's Dibner Library.

We started with the questions:  How did we come to be? What is beyond the earth? How did the universe begin? How has man conceived of his place in the universe throughout history? The human condition is marked by an awareness of a mortal self and a curiosity about the surrounding world, giving rise to certain questions that have been answered by myths, philosophies, and mathematics.  The Rubin Museum of Art’s (RMA) upcoming exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, will explore the different systems, both religious and scientific, that have developed in Eastern and Western cultures to explain man’s relationship to the universe.

 As the curatorial assistant for this exhibition, I was charged with providing the research for the Western portion of the show. I had help from a greatly accomplished astrophysicist in putting together a preliminary list of potential objects, but it wasn’t nearly enough to narrate the Western tale of the cosmos.

We turned to the Smithsonian.  As a new Affiliate, we relied on the help of our liaison, Jennifer, to set up the appropriate avenues to research a new subject area. She believed the best outlet to meet our needs was the Dibner Library. I was a bit skeptical because I had never heard of this library and felt the allure of other more well-known Smithsonian museums and research centers. Jennifer sent me a list of relevant books held by the Dibner, available from their online catalog (another great resource for Affiliates). I had a list of remarkable pieces to start with, many of which were housed at the Dibner itself, inside the National Museum of American History. I decided that I needed to see these pieces for myself and find the images that would illustrate our story.

Within two weeks I had an appointment and traveled the four-and-a-half hours to Washington D.C. When I arrived, the staff at the Dibner Library had all of the books I requested, and more, set out for me. To my pleasant surprise, the librarians took my topic and ran with it. I was presented with numerous books dealing with an assortment of corresponding themes that they had extracted from my original list. I was impressed by the effort that had been put into this scholarly search, and thankfully, one of the librarians explained their research strategies and rationale with me upon my arrival. I was then led into the cozy, dimly-lit reading room and sat down with my pile of books for the rest of the day. Each time I reached the maximum limit of books allowed in the room, the pile would rotate out for an equally large stack. I was thumbing through each of the books, making notes and marking pages of interest. Instead of drawing my typical makeshift renderings of the images, the librarian made a copy of the pages I selected. I was elated.

I am so pleased with the final selection of books that we are borrowing from the Dibner for our show. The section of the show I researched will trace how Western medieval anthropocentric cosmology, which envisioned humans at the center of a static universe, was replaced in the Renaissance by a heliocentric universe, giving rise to our present, evolving astrophysical worldview. Among the 6 rare books we borrowed from the Smithsonian are texts ranging from the 10th – 17th centuries, representing great scientists and philosophers such as Galileo, Oronce Finé, and Joannes de Sacro Bosco.

My experience made it clear that my institution’s new affiliation with the Smithsonian will be a great tool for us.   I hope that my experience inspires other Affiliates to create similar partnerships and take advantage of smaller Smithsonian entities like the Dibner Library.

To read more stories about discoveries and collections at the Smithsonian’s network of 20 libraries, check out their blog and website.