The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) recently awarded the University of Illinois Library three National Leadership Grants! Congratulations to everyone on all of these successful proposals! We look forward to seeing the research, services, and enhanced practice that will come from the proposed work.Jennifer Hain Teper will serve as the director for a project that will produce a detailed preservation report prioritizing collection items in order of preservation need. This tool will build upon her previous work developing a similar tool for assessing audio-visual collections, and will produce a detailed preservation report prioritizing collection items in order of preservation need. The University of Illinois Libraries will partner with the William R. and Clarice V. Spurlock Museum; the McLean County Museum of History; Heritage Preservation, Inc.; the Chicago History Museum; the Illinois Heritage Association; and the Illinois State Library to develop the Preservation Self-Assessment Program, a free computer-based tool that will help library, museum, and archives staff to conduct physical assessment and prioritization of preservation needs for paper-based and photographic materials. The IMLS awarded the project $213,932.
Sarah Shreeves will serve as principal investigator for a project that will revise and expand the Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections with strong engagement from the broad cultural heritage community. The Framework is a set of principles governing the creation and management of digital collections and includes sections examining the principles of good digital objects, metadata, collections, and initiatives. The Framework was last updated in 2007. In the updated version, contributors of the project aim to add a section on reuse and sharing, link recommended practices to clearly defined outcomes, and provide examples that reflect the reality of small institutions with limited resources as well as large, well-resourced institutions. The project was awarded $76,894.
Harriett Green, who partnered with Dr. Rachel Fleming-May at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, was awarded a planning grant for the project “Virtual Verse in the Library: Surveying the E-Poetry Landscape.” The project will explore the feasibility of an online index, and possibly a full-text repository, of individual poetry works published only in electronic format. The project team will consider a variety of issues ranging from technical and intellectual property issues, to discovery and use rights, licensing schema, and strategies for sustaining such a resource. A final report will be widely disseminated detailing findings and recommendations for future action. The project was awarded $49,938.
