Harvard Libraries seek Digital Project grant proposals

Sidney Verba, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the University Library, has announced a University-wide call for proposals for library-related digitization projects that support teaching and research at Harvard. According to Verba, grant funding is available through Harvards Library Digital Initiative (LDI) and its internal challenge grant program.

The deadline for preliminary proposals is May 26. Proposals must provide access to high-priority digital resources that have immediate and demonstrable use in current teaching and research at Harvard. Accordingly, project managers are encouraged to identify and select content that supports current courses or ongoing research projects. For example, a successful project might catalog and digitize historical text and images from the library’s collections that relate to a course assignment or that can serve as background material for specific lectures.

For more information, consult the call for proposals now online at http://hul.harvard.edu/ldi/html/current_call.html. In addition, to be added to the list of expected proposals, contact Wendy Gogel at wendy_gogel@harvard.edu or (617) 495-3724.

Since its inception in 1998, Harvard’s LDI has funded 45 related projects in nine prior rounds of proposals. Through the LDI program, hundreds of Harvard staff members have gained experience in working with digital projects and have made enormous contributions to teaching and research across the University. Project goals have ranged from straightforward digitizing of images or text to creating Web-accessible collections that combine related modern and historic material from different repositories across the University to developing new systems for the cataloging and delivery of specialized data. Many projects have focused on providing access to previously inaccessible collections and making them available online for use by students and scholars at Harvard and around the world. For a complete list of LDI-funded projects to date, see http://hul.harvard.edu/ldi/html/funded_projects.html.