2007 National Leadership Grant Announcement

California  |  Colorado  |  District of Columbia  |  Illinois  |  Indiana  |  Maine  |  Massachusetts  |  Michigan 

Missouri  |  New Hampshire  |  New Jersey  |  New York  |  Oregon  |  Rhode Island  |  Tennessee 

Texas  |  Utah  |  Vermont  |  Virginia 

California

Fresno Art Museum - Fresno, CA
Award Amount: $361,471; Matching Amount: $367,992
Grant Category: Library and Museum Collaboration

Contact: Ms. Patt Castro
Office and Membership Manager
559-441-4221 ext. 102; patt@fresnoartmuseum.org

Project Title: "Creating Cultural Communities for Life Long Learning"
The Fresno Art Museum, in partnership with the Fresno Public Library, will deliver arts programming to three majority Hispanic communities in Fresno County: Mendota, Orange Cove, and Tranquillity. Together with the local school district and government entities, they will create bilingual lifelong learning experiences for children and adults and will serve as a model for other ethnically diverse agricultural communities.

Japanese American National Museum - Los Angeles, CA
Award Amount: $30,000; Matching Amount: $10,000
Grant Category: Planning Grants

Contact: Mr. John Esaki
Director of Programs
213-830-5684; jesaki@janm.org

Project Title: "Talk to Me: Fostering Oral Histories in Schools"
This planning grant will study how communities, schools, and museums can collaborate to integrate oral histories into the classroom to enhance learning and benefit young people. The museum will partner with the Kauai Complex Area within the Hawaii State Department of Education to focus on the ethnically diverse geographical region of Hawaii, building on their knowledge of Japanese culture within the United States to link oral histories to state content and performance standards for K–12 education. This project will enlarge the knowledge of Japanese histories within the classroom, and provide a model for other schools to integrate diverse ethnic and cultural experiences into their curricula.

University of California, Los Angeles - Los Angeles, CA
Award Amount: $249,326; Matching Amount: $136,004
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Dr. Robert Englund
Professor
310-825-8506; englund@ucla.edu

Project Title: "Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative: Second Generation"
The UCLA University Library and UCLA’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures will create the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative: Second Generation (CDLI 2). The project will migrate 450,000 legacy archival and access images and metadata from CDLI to UCLA’s Digital Library Content System, standardizing and upgrading the metadata to improve discovery and enable content archival within the California Digital Library’s Digital Preservation Repository. The project will add 7,000 digital artifacts with cuneiform inscriptions, including collections housed at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute and in the Middle East, to be scanned by the Max Planck Institute and the French Institute of the Near East. This project will ensure the long-term preservation of text inscribed on endangered ancient cuneiform tablets.

University of California, Los Angeles - Los Angeles, CA
Award Amount: $29,675; Matching Amount: $28,025
Grant Category: Planning Grants

Contact: Mr. Stephen Davison
Head, UCLA Digital Library Program
310-267-5135; sdavison@library.ucla.edu

Project Title: "Planning the Next Generation Sheet Music Consortium"
The University of California, Los Angeles, and Indiana University will explore the additional tools needed by institutions that wish to contribute data to the Sheet Music Consortium, a metadata harvesting service designed to provide searching capabilities for sheet music collections hosted by diverse institutions in a single interface. The partners will investigate the services that end users of the Consortium value most highly as a basis for future improvement.

Colorado

Denver Public Library - Denver, CO
Award Amount: $778,509; Matching Amount: $846,261
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Mr. James Kroll
Manager, Western History/Geneaology Dept
720-865-1820; jkroll@denver.lib.co.us

Project Title: "Creating Communities: Digitizing Denver's Historic Neighborhoods"
The Denver Public Library, in partnership with the City of Denver, the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, Denver Historical Society, University of Colorado at Denver Auraria Library, and University of Denver Penrose Library, will inventory, catalog, and digitize historic documents of the City and County of Denver, linking them to existing information about buildings and neighborhoods and preserving the digital files in the Alliance Digital Repository. This project will create a model of local public-private collaboration to preserve and provide access to cultural and historical materials.

Denver Botanic Gardens - Denver, CO
Award Amount: $29,987; Matching Amount: $21,604
Grant Category: Planning Grants

Contact: Ms. Cindy Tejral
Manager of Plant Records
720-865-3553; tejralc@botanicgardens.org

Project Title: "Denver Botanic Gardens and Partners: An On-line Herbarium for Rocky Mountain Flora"
This planning grant will include Botanical Garden partners Colorado State University, the University of Wyoming, and the University of Colorado in the development of an online herbarium of plants of the Rocky Mountain area. This project will engage in the planning to make this shared institutional information available to a wider audience. The digital model created through the grant project will provide a plan for other institutions that wish to combine shared resources and physical specimens into an online tool. When the online herbarium about the Rocky Mountain region is created, users from all arenas—scientist to hobbyist—will report a measured increase in ease of access to desired specimen information.

District of Columbia

Council on Library and Information Resources - Washington, DC
Award Amount: $30,000; Matching Amount: $0
Grant Category: Planning Grants

Contact: Dr. Charles Henry
President
202-939-4752; chenry@clir.org

Project Title: "By Scholar's Design: A National Program for Scholars' Analysis and Development of Cyberinfrastructure"
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) will plan a project to develop a cohort of humanities and social sciences scholars, drawn from and building on the graduates of the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in Scholarly Information Resources. The scholars will work toward coordinating and linking together the new large-scale digital initiatives that are being developed across the country in line with the recommendations of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Illinois

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign - Champaign, IL
Award Amount: $975,903; Matching Amount: $358,508
Grant Category: Research and Demonstration

Contact: Dr. Carole Palmer
Associate Professor
217-244-0653; clpalmer@uiuc.edu

Project Title: "Next Generation Digital Federations: Adding Value through Collection Evaluation, Metadata Relations, and Strategic Scaling"
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), in a cooperative agreement with IMLS, will investigate and implement a systematic approach to developing useful, meaningful, and usable digital collections. Building on the prior work of the IMLS Digital Collections and Content (DCC) project, the researchers will explore how to use the relationships between collection-level and item-level metadata in federated digital repositories to preserve content and make the content more useful for scholars and the public. The project will experiment with and test metasearch capabilities, and expand and improve the IMLS DCC with new IMLS-funded and other digital content and advanced search capabilities.

University of Illinois - Champaign, IL
Award Amount: $225,747; Matching Amount: $203,282
Grant Category: Research and Demonstration

Contact: Mr. William Mischo
Engineering Librarian
217-333-7497; w-mischo@uiuc.edu

Project Title: "Demonstration of Portal Mechanisms for Enhanced resource Integration in the Academic Information Environment"
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library will develop and test prototype library portals designed to enhance resource integration in academic libraries. The project will develop portal mechanisms that better integrate a library’s multiple search and discovery tools and provide enhanced access to distributed primary and secondary information. Utilizing transaction log analysis, focus groups, and individual interviews, the research team will investigate the utility of search assistance techniques. The portal mechanisms developed in this project will be useful to the development of next-generation resource discovery and metasearch systems.

Shedd Aquarium - Chicago, IL
Award Amount: $485,241; Matching Amount: $485,241
Grant Category: Research and Demonstration

Contact: Mr. Christian Greer
Director of Education
312-692-3354; cgreer@sheddaquarium.org

Project Title: "The Big Open-Source Strategic Project (BOSS): Connecting Communities to Collections"
The Big Open Source Strategic (BOSS) project is a comprehensive audience and community engagement project between the Shedd and its diverse community. The goal of this three-year demonstration is to measure the effect of an open source approach to connecting communities and museum collections. This project will directly affect schools, neighborhoods, and museum members by increasing audience input and collaboration. Communities will be empowered to design their own Shedd-based programs. Also, several new advisory councils will directly influence strategic thinking and education program development by allowing audience members to become the “boss.” A Web-based BOSS Project tutorial will be developed so that other institutions can adapt the practices that are developed in this project.

Lincoln Park Zoological Gardens - Chicago, IL
Award Amount: $436,122; Matching Amount: $442,080
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Dr. Susan Margulis
Curator of Primates
312-742-2345; smargulis@lpzoo.org

Project Title: "Ethosearch: The Ethogram Archive Project"
The Lincoln Park Zoo will partner with the State University of New York at Binghamton’s Research Foundation to develop Ethosearch: The Ethogram Archive Project (EAP), a Web-based database tool that will be of critical value to zoological managers, researchers, and students. The database will be a searchable, open, clearly defined, and accessible tool. Ethograms, the behavioral patterns of an organism or a species, represent the fundamental basis of animal behavioral research. A collection of standardized behavioral information on animal species in zoological parks is needed, and the Lincoln Park Zoo will initiate compilation and standardization of ethograms beginning with two groups, primates and birds. The completed project will be disseminated through conferences, college courses, and training workshops.

Kohl Children's Museum - Glenview, IL
Award Amount: $30,000; Matching Amount: $21,594
Grant Category: Planning Grants

Contact: Ms. Mary Trieschmann
Vice President of Programs
847-832-6870; mtrieschmann@kohlchildrensmuseum.org

Project Title: "Informal Learning and Children's Museums Collaborative Planning Grant"
Kohl Children’s Museum will partner with National-Louis University and Selinda Research Associates to research and plan a template to test the effectiveness of free-choice learning on children between one and eight years of age within the Kohl Children’s Museum. The research design created through the planning grant will explore a number of specific questions: How does museum learning transfer to schools and family settings? How do children benefit from guided discovery? Does exposure to natural environments improve children’s cognitive development? And, how do informal free-choice environments stimulate social interactions?

Illinois State Museum Society - Springfield, IL
Award Amount: $564,651; Matching Amount: $606,193
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Dr. Robert Warren
Curator of Anthropology
217-524-7903; warren@museum.state.il.us

Project Title: "Oral History of Illinois Agriculture"
The Illinois State Museum Society will create a Web module, the Audio-Video Barn, featuring digital oral histories of people involved in Illinois’s agriculture and rural life. Partnering with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, the Department of Archives and Special Collections at the University of Illinois, the Regional History Center at Northern Illinois University, and Randforce Associates, LLC, of the University at Buffalo Technology Incubator in New York, the museum will combine archived interviews with new oral histories. Interviews archived at partner institutions will be digitized, and all data will be indexed to improve access. The interactive Web module will provide Internet visitors with a rich view of Illinois agriculture and enable regional institutions to share their stories through individual histories.

Indiana

Purdue University - West Lafayette, IN
Award Amount: $421,068; Matching Amount: $249,847
Grant Category: Research and Demonstration

Contact: Mr. Scott Brandt
Associate Dean of Research
765-494-2889; techman@purdue.edu

Project Title: "Investigating Data Curation Profiles Across Multiple Research Disciplines"
Investigators in the Distributed Data Curation Center in the Libraries at Purdue University, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign will address the question “which researchers are willing to share data, when, with whom, and under what conditions?” The team will produce case studies of researcher data/metadata workflow, curation profiles describing policies for archiving and making available research data, a matrix to compare parameters across disciplines, system requirements for managing data in a repository, and recommendations for implementing results under diverse systems. The project will describe the roles of librarians and identify the skill sets they need to facilitate scholarly communication and data sharing.

Maine

Maine Historical Society - Portland, ME
Award Amount: $852,058; Matching Amount: $858,888
Grant Category: Library and Museum Collaboration

Contact: Mr. Stephen Bromage
Assistant Director
207-774-1822 ext. 223; sbromage@mainehistory.org

Project Title: "Maine Community Heritage Project: Mobilizing Communities and Engaging Youth, Online and On the Ground"
Maine Historical Society, in partnership with the Maine State Library, will coordinate local teams from 16 Maine communities—one from each county in the state—to develop a statewide Community Heritage Project that will create content-rich Web sites for the Maine Memory Network (see www.mainememory.net). Librarians, museum professionals, teachers, and students will work together to provide local history resources for broader user access.

Massachusetts

WGBH Educational Foundation - Boston, MA
Award Amount: $709,420; Matching Amount: $709,435
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Ms. Karen Cariani
Director
617-300-4286; karen_cariani@wgbh.org

Project Title: "WGBH Educational Foundation Media Library and Archives, University of Massachusetts/Boston and Columbia University: The Vietnam Digital Library"
The WGBH Educational Foundation Media Library and Archives, in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts/Boston (UMB) and the Columbia University Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL), will create a digital library of material relating to the 1983 series Vietnam: A Television History. Scholars, academics, and the general public will access the original interview materials and stills, and most of the stock footage gathered for the series. Entire interviews will stream online and link to interactive transcripts, allowing users to explore an interview at any point. Online note-taking will enable social networking among worldwide users. The project will be a model partnership among a public television station’s moving image archive, university library staff, and a university digital media center.

Michigan

Michigan State University - East Lansing, MI
Award Amount: $593,965; Matching Amount: $202,723
Grant Category: Research and Demonstration

Contact: Mr. Jeffrey Grabill
Associate Professor
517-353-9164; grabill@msu.edu

Project Title: "Take Two: A Study of the Co-Creation of Knowledge on Museum Web 2.0 Sites"
The Writing in Digital Environments Research Center at Michigan State University, in partnership with the Michigan State University Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science, and the Science Museum of Minnesota, will develop and test a research framework to study the new generation of social technologies (interactive Web-based social spaces), and how they influence the creation of knowledge and museum practice. The content base of the research will be the Science Museum of Minnesota’s Science Buzz (http://buzz.smm.org/buzz/) at the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science, and includes the Buzz Web site and Science Buzz kiosk case studies. Research methodologies, models, and findings will be part of the dissemination effort, which will occur through conference presentations and publications.

Michigan State University - East Lansing, MI
Award Amount: $911,809; Matching Amount: $972,311
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Dr. Mark Kornbluh
Director, Matrix Center
517-355-9300; mark@mail.matrix.msu.edu

Project Title: "The Quilt Index: Online Tools and Ephemera Expansion"
Michigan State University, through MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online and the Michigan State University Museum, and its partners (The Alliance for American Quilts; University of Texas at Austin, Center for American History, Winedale; and the American Folk Art Museum), will engage in an expansive digital project. This project will increase the usability and interactivity of The Quilt Index for quilters and researchers. The project will evaluate the development of database Web tools and expand content. This project will train quilters and educators to build online exhibits, multimedia presentations, lesson plans, and resources for the public Web site. Dissemination of the project will occur through conferences, electronic mailing lists, and the project Web site (www.quiltindex.org).

Missouri

Missouri Botanical Garden - St. Louis, MO
Award Amount: $284,169; Matching Amount: $339,950
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Dr. Robert Magill
Senior Vice President for Research
314-577-5161; bob.magill@mobot.org

Project Title: "eFloras.org: A Collaborative Portal for Biodiversity Research"
The Missouri Botanical Garden will expand eFloras, a Web portal that enables researchers working in natural areas to interact with core botanical data, determine plant identifications, and record research observations. This eFloras enhancement project will develop a standard natural history schema, integrate digital tools, develop options for personal electronics, and provide an opportunity to investigate and catalog natural history resources. This project will improve collection and dissemination of natural history data and biodiversity. An enhanced eFloras Web portal will serve as a model for all natural history disciplines, improve the collaborative collection of data, and increase availability of this information to a scientific audience. Dissemination will be through blogs, presentations, an electronic mailing list, and on the project’s Web site.

New Hampshire

New England Law Library Consortium - Keene, NH
Award Amount: $364,150; Matching Amount: $487,552
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Ms. Tracy Thompson
Executive Director
603-357-3385; tracy.thompson@yale.edu

Project Title: "NELLCO Universal Search Solution"
The New England Law Library Consortium, Inc., will address a pervasive problem that libraries and researchers commonly face: connecting the library researcher to the relevant e-resources that the library has acquired. The Universal Search Solution project will take a different approach from federated searching by developing a “one-box” search solution: an open source, dynamic, searchable index across library-defined e-resources, including each library’s Online Public Access Catalog, subscription-based publications, and free Web resources.

New Jersey

College of New Jersey - Ewing, NJ
Award Amount: $24,417; Matching Amount: $11,949
Grant Category: Planning Grants

Contact: Mr. Taras Pavlovsky
Dean of the Library
609-771-2332; pavlovsk@tcnj.edu

Project Title: "Shared Open Source Library System Planning"
The College of New Jersey will collaborate with the New Jersey Institute of Technology and William Paterson University to plan for the development of a shared, open source ILS (Integrated Library System) to support shared library services and operations. The project team will develop a report that will be presented to VALE (the Virtual Academic Library Environment of New Jersey) as well as made available to other interested parties via a Creative Common License.

RutgersUniversity - New Brunswick, NJ
Award Amount: $964,887; Matching Amount: $542,043
Grant Category: Research and Demonstration

Contact: Dr. Nicholas Belkin
Director
732-932-7500 ext. 8271; nick@belkin.rutgers.edu

Project Title: "Personalization of the Digital Library Experience"
Researchers at the Rutgers University School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies will investigate ways to improve the ability of people to find information they need in digital libraries. By examining the interaction of factors such as the searcher’s location, individual characteristics, the nature of his or her task, and similar data, the team will create a “personalization assistant” that will help searchers use digital libraries more effectively. The open source tool based on this research will reside on the user’s own computer to enhance the user’s interactions with digital libraries while protecting the user’s privacy.

William Paterson University - Wayne, NJ
Award Amount: $971,512; Matching Amount: $1,123,706
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Dr. Sandra Miller
Director, Instruction and Research Technology
973-720-2659; MillerS@wpunj.edu

Project Title: "NJVid: New Jersey Video Portal"
William Paterson University’s NJVid project will create and test a statewide digital video repository and portal with tools and services, providing “lectures on demand,” licensed commercial videos, and locally owned videos for use by members of the partner collaboratives. Three major consortia representing most educational information organizations throughout the state—VALE (Virtual Academic Library Environment); New Jersey Digital Highway, the statewide cultural heritage consortium; and NJEdge.Net, the statewide Internet2 networking consortium—will incorporate and extend their video resources and services in this strategic initiative. William Paterson University, Rutgers University, and eight other institutions—including universities, community colleges, a high school, a county public library system, and a museum—will serve as initial testers of this model integrated resource.

New York

Wildlife Conservation Society - Bronx, NY
Award Amount: $29,775; Matching Amount: $17,255
Grant Category: Planning Grants

Contact: Ms. Jessica Sickler
718- 741-1715; jsickler@wcs.org

Project Title: "The Language of Conservation, National Replication Study Planning Grant"
The Wildlife Conservation Society, in partnership with Poet’s House, will build on an earlier IMLS-funded project that brought poetic expression to the Central Park Zoo by hiring a poet-in-residence who assisted with the development of zoo signage and contributed innovative language to visual resources to promote conservation. The planning project will extend this concept to five diverse communities across the country, tentatively identified as New Orleans, Louisiana; Salt Lake City, Utah; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Jacksonville, Florida. The planning project will engage libraries in each community with a local zoo and help them to develop partnerships that promote conservation and draw on local strengths and resources.

Americans for Libraries Council - New York, NY
Award Amount: $241,808; Matching Amount: $193,992
Grant Category: Library and Museum Collaboration

Contact: Ms. Diantha Schull
President
646-336-6236; ddschull@lff.org

Project Title: "Age in America: Expanding Public Understanding of Aging Through Museum-Library Collaboration"
Americans for Libraries Council (ALC) and its partners in New York, Connecticut, and Virginia will develop public programming among cultural institutions that engage intergenerational audiences in exploring the experience of aging in America from historical, cultural, and artistic perspectives. The project will occur in Norfolk, Virginia; Hartford, Connecticut; and Suffolk County, New York, which were selected for their relatively large numbers of active older residents. ALC, its National Advisors, and partners will work with the demonstration communities to develop an Age in America Programming Guide, provide content and technical expertise, and ensure online and face-to-face networking. A culminating report, Designs for Change: Libraries and Museum Collaborations on Aging, will enable local libraries and museums to build a community of practice.

New York Public Library - New York, NY
Award Amount: $30,000; Matching Amount: $60,979
Grant Category: Planning Grants

Contact: Mr. Robert McBrien
Associate Director, Programs and Collections
212-340-0910; rmcbrien@nypl.org

Project Title: "Engaging Students, Parents, and Educators in the Creation of an Online Homework Help Resource"
The New York Public Library (NYPL), with partnering institutions Brooklyn Public Library and Queens Borough Public Library, will plan a project to identify and evaluate the homework reference needs of students, educators, parents, and librarians for the purpose of designing an integrated homework help Web site that will effectively respond to young people’s needs regarding new digital technologies.

George Eastman House - Rochester, NY
Award Amount: $323,378; Matching Amount: $248,648
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Mr. Roger Bruce
Director of Interpretation
585-271-3361 ext. 235; rbruce@geh.org

Project Title: "Wiki for Expertise in the Evaluation of Photography"
The George Eastman House will develop an online Wiki for Expertise in the Evaluation of Photographs. A wiki is a Web site or similar online resource that allows users to add and edit content. The George Eastman House is an authority on the care and evaluation of photographic collections, and this project will expand their pilot wiki project into a larger, comprehensive online resource addressing various elements of photograph appreciation and identification. This information will be freely distributed as a searchable database, and the final product of a dynamic online resource for photography scholars and conservators will provide a model that can be implemented by other organizations.

Rochester Institute of Technology - Rochester, NY
Award Amount: $314,215; Matching Amount: $45,779
Grant Category: Research and Demonstration

Contact: Mr. Daniel Burge
Research Scientist
585-475-5931; dmbpph@rit.edu

Project Title: "The DP3 Project: Digital Print Preservation Portal"
The Rochester Institute of Technology Image Permanence Institute will research the effects on digital prints in libraries and museums of housing and display materials and of handling. The project will also assess the risk of flood damage to these materials. Results will be freely accessible on a new, unique Web site called the DP3 Project: Digital Print Preservation Portal.

Rochester Institute of Technology - Rochester, NY
Award Amount: $332,760; Matching Amount: $332,900
Grant Category: Research and Demonstration

Contact: Mr. James Reilly
Director
585-475-2306; jmrpph@rit.edu

Project Title: "Research and Development for Web-based Environmental Risk Analysis (WebERA)"
The Rochester Institute of Technology’s Image Permanence Institute (IPI), in response to the key finding of the Heritage Health Index, will investigate a Web-based system for environmental risk analysis called WebERA. Using a pilot group of 10 museums and five libraries, this project will demonstrate a tool that will allow museum and library environments to be evaluated and monitored through Internet connections. The project makes use of IPI’s extensive laboratory and field experience with environmental and energy issues, and will incorporate new technology, simplify environmental interactions, and determine what features in this environmental risk management system will be most valuable. If the research is successful, IPI will offer WebERA as a public service to the museum and library community.

Syracuse University - Syracuse, NY
Award Amount: $191,114; Matching Amount: $72,298
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Ms. Anne Diekema
Research Professor
315-443-5484; diekemar@syr.edu

Project Title: "Enhancing Access to Digital Collections using Automatic Metadata Assignment and Search Tools"
Syracuse University’s Center for Natural Language Processing in the School of Information Studies, partnering with a team from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), will integrate three digital library tools and services to create a new hybrid, computer-assisted cataloging system, the Metadata Assignment and Search Tool (MAST). MAST will enable libraries and museums to describe and disseminate their digital materials efficiently and link them to state-level educational standards, making these materials fully available in a digital library or searchable through Web services from their own Web sites.

Oregon

Libraries of Eastern Oregon - Fossil, OR
Award Amount: $363,576; Matching Amount: $488,475
Grant Category: Library and Museum Collaboration

Contact: Ms. Lyn Craig
Executive Director
541-763-2355; fossilinn@centurytel.net

Project Title: "A Sense of Place"
The Libraries of Eastern Oregon consortium, in partnership with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry and other partners, will deliver programs in science and art to 30 disadvantaged rural communities, including three Native American reservations. The public libraries will host onsite programs, interactive distance learning, and hands-on activities for lifelong learning and community enrichment. The Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Oregon Council for the Humanities will contribute programming in the arts. The involvement of major museums with a local team will provide a model for designing lifelong learning opportunities for rural and economically disadvantaged areas.

Portland State University - Portland, OR
Award Amount: $910,064; Matching Amount: $910,064
Grant Category: Research and Demonstration

Contact: Professor Stephen Reder
Professor and Chair
503-725-3999; reders@pdx.edu

Project Title: "Using the Learner Web to Enhance Library-Community Collaboration on Adult Literacy (Demonstration Project)"
The Millar Library at Portland State University will conduct a national demonstration and evaluation of the Learner Web, an Internet- and telephone-accessed tool that connects self-directed adults with basic literacy skill needs to learning management systems supported by online and local community-based resources. With a consortium of libraries, community organizations, state agencies, and educational institutions in six states across the country, the project will field-test the Learner Web to determine what is needed to implement it in rural and city public libraries of varying sizes, creating the documentation and organizational capacity to implement the system nationally.

Rhode Island

Brown University Library - Providence, RI
Award Amount: $29,609; Matching Amount: $88,995
Grant Category: Planning Grants

Contact: Dr. Holly Snyder
North American History Librarian
401-863-1515; holly_snyder@brown.edu

Project Title: "Gorham Company Collaborative Planning Project"
The Brown University Library, partnering with the Library and the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, plans to develop new database architecture for silverware collections that are held by museums around the world. Based on the Gorham Manufacturing Company’s catalog, the digital library will include archival drawings, sketches, and product descriptions that will enable users to identify their pieces and contribute to a union catalog of holdings. The product descriptions will also contribute to an authoritative thesaurus of descriptive terms (metadata) that can be used broadly for silver collections. The project is a model partnership that builds on the subject expertise of the museum curators and the digital library expertise of the Brown University Library Special Collections.

Tennessee

Frist Center for the Visual Arts - Nashville, TN
Award Amount: $761,098; Matching Amount: $323,508
Grant Category: Research and Demonstration

Contact: Ms. Anne Henderson
Director of Education
615-744-3338; ahenderson@fristcenter.org

Project Title: "Family Learning in Interactive Galleries"
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts, the High Museum of Art, and the J.B. Speed Museum of Art will conduct a research project, Family Learning in Interactive Galleries, to understand how family galleries in art museums facilitate intergenerational learning. Educators will conduct this study in partnership with the Institute for Learning Innovation. This project will include a literature review of research in related fields, a large-scale study of 2,100 family visitors, and a longitudinal ethnographic study of 18 families. Results will address the needs of visitors, staff, researchers, and the museum field with learning outcomes, a specific methodology, and tested instruments for the field. A multimedia tool kit will be available on DVD to disseminate the study’s results.

Texas

Texas A&M University - College Station, TX
Award Amount: $403,737; Matching Amount: $420,949
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Mr. John Leggett
Associate Dean of Libraries
979-458-4116; leggett@library.tamu.edu

Project Title: "The Texas ETD Repository: Promoting our Scholarship and Preserving our Legacy"
Texas A&M University, through the Texas Digital Library, a cooperative organization of institutions of higher learning in Texas, will develop and implement the Texas ETD Repository, a statewide system for managing the entire life cycle of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) from initial submission to final publication. By ensuring consistent standards and interoperability, the Texas ETD Repository will establish a federated statewide repository for long-term preservation.

Dallas Museum of Art - Dallas, TX
Award Amount: $519,435; Matching Amount: $519,645
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Mr. Homer Gutierrez
Information Technology Director
214-922-1206; hgutierrez@dallasmuseumofart.org

Project Title: "The Arts Network: The Arts Broadcasting System (TABS)"
The Arts Broadcasting System (TABS) project will create a flexible, multifunctional system interface for unlimited access to 13,000 digital resources from the Dallas Museum of Art’s encyclopedic collections. The project is based on five years of planning, audience research, and consultation, building on two institutional strategic initiatives—the Arts Network and Levels of Engagement with Art. It will allow visitors to customize their museum experiences in the galleries and at home via the Internet. By applying lessons learned about audiences and implementing technology, the TABS project will enhance onsite museum visits, increase accessibility to the collection, and provide data on online museum visits. A public blog, final reports, a 2009 national forum, and conference presentations will share progress and results.

University of North Texas - Denton, TX
Award Amount: $448,548; Matching Amount: $224,330
Grant Category: Research and Demonstration

Contact: Ms. Cathy Hartman
Assistant Dean, Digital and Info.Technologies
940-565-3269; chartman@library.unt.edu

Project Title: "Optimizing the User Experience in an Architecture for Rapid Development"
The University of North Texas Libraries will develop a model for an iterative user-centered design process in a rapid development framework that digital libraries can implement to improve the usability and effectiveness of their resources for targeted user groups. This project will focus on the information-seeking behavior and needs of genealogists, who constitute a third of all digital library users, who are using the Portal to Texas History, to develop the model.

Children's Museum of Houston - Houston, TX
Award Amount: $946,396; Matching Amount: $1,085,193
Grant Category: Library and Museum Collaboration

Contact: Ms. Tammie Kahn
Executive Director
713-522-7211; tkahn@cmhouston.org

Project Title: "CLiCK (City of Learners | Collection of Kits)"
The Children’s Museum of Houston, in partnership with the Houston Public Library and others, will develop and make available nationally multilingual kits that will increase literacy and family learning through “CLiCK: City of Learners/Collection of Kits.” The project builds on two earlier IMLS-funded National Leadership Grant collaborations, “Tot Spot,” which studied learning in early childhood and provided information to caregivers, and “Para los Ninos,” which extended the project to Hispanic communities. The new project will engage two additional cities—Brooklyn, New York; and San Jose, California. Language kits including Vietnamese, Cantonese, and Spanish will be developed to meet the needs of audiences in each city.

Rice University's Fondren Library - Houston, TX
Award Amount: $979,578; Matching Amount: $980,613
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Ms. Geneva Henry
Executive Director, Digital Library Initiative
713-348-2480; ghenry@rice.edu

Project Title: "Our Americas Archive Partnership (OAAP)"
The Fondren Library at Rice University, in partnership with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland, will develop an innovative approach to helping users search, browse, analyze, and share content from distributed online collections through their “Our Americas Archive Partnership” (OAAP). OAAP will incorporate recent Web 2.0 technologies to help users discover and use relevant source materials in languages other than English and will improve users’ ability to find relevant materials using domain-specific vocabulary searches. Two online collections of materials in English and Spanish, The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA), and a new digital archive of materials to be developed at Rice, will provide an initial corpus for testing the tools.

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston - Houston, TX
Award Amount: $662,187; Matching Amount: $663,318
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Ms. Wynne Phelan
Conservator
713-639-7736; wphelan@mfah.org

Project Title: "Art Conservation Database"
The Art Conservation Database (ACD) being developed by the Museum of Fine Arts will combine detailed text and image records of works on paper, paintings, and three-dimensional art; comprehensive condition reports; and collection care records in one database system in conjunction with an advisory committee working in the field. The Museum of Fine Art Houston’s goal is to create a streamlined database, with standardized conservation and preservation vocabulary, for experts and novices within the conservation field as well as museum staff. After significant peer review and system tests of the ACD, the database will be available to other institutions as a model of how to create and integrate conservation data within a museum environment.

Utah

University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library - Salt Lake City, UT
Award Amount: $353,237; Matching Amount: $353,651
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Mr. Kenning Arlitsch
Head, Information Technology
801-585-3721; kenning.arlitsch@utah.edu

Project Title: "Western Soundscape Archive"
The J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah, partnering with the National Park Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, and other partners, will build the Western Soundscape Archive (WSA), a comprehensive and free online resource of animal and environmental sounds of the western United States. Through freely available streaming audio files and downloadable podcasts, scientists, scholars, educators, students, and nature enthusiasts will be able to identify animals and hear ambient recordings of places that no longer exist or have been altered, or that they are unable to visit. In addition to creating or repurposing existing digital natural sound recordings, the project team will interview scientists and generate stories for National Public Radio.

Vermont

Lake Champlain Maritime Museum - Vergennes, VT
Award Amount: $247,297; Matching Amount: $110,439
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Ms. Sarah Lyman
"Shipwrecks!" Project Director
802-475-2022; sarahl@lcmm.org

Project Title: ""Shipwrecks!" at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum"
The “Shipwrecks” project will use Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) technology to bring underwater archaeology to a wide audience. This project connects people to underwater history and science in an interactive way without requiring them to get wet or go underwater. By using an ROV to bring live digital video footage from the site of a shipwreck, the experience is shared concurrently with the underwater exploration through webcasts and Web postings. This technology provides a model for maritime museums to explore underwater resources and encourages environmental stewardship of underwater cultural sites. The museum will discuss project results through its Internet site and presentations, and museum staff will visit other organizations interested in ROV technology to demonstrate its implementation.

Virginia

Center for History and New Media at George Mason University - Fairfax, VA
Award Amount: $249,817; Matching Amount: $127,916
Grant Category: Building Digital Resources

Contact: Dr. Roy Rosenzweig
Project Director
703-993-4532; rrosenzw@gmu.edu

Project Title: "OMEKA- A Free, Open-source, Standards-Based, Easy-to-Use Web Publishing Platform to Bring History and Heritage Museums into the Era of Web 2.0"
The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University project will create OMEKA, a next-generation Web publishing tool that will enhance the ability of museums to showcase their collections and content online. OMEKA is designed specifically for smaller history museums, heritage societies, and historic sites that may not have the resources or expertise to create and maintain their own online tools. This new open source Web tool will offer an easy, professional, and state-of-the-art way for museums to display their content online. It will provide a standards-based interoperable system to share and use digital content in multiple contexts. The Web site (www.omeka.org) and conference presentations will inform interested museums about the tool.