The University of Iowa Libraries

Digital Humanities Advancement Grants (NEH)

• Deadline: January and June.
• Level 1: Max $40,000
• Level 2: Max $75,000
• Level 3: Max $325,000From the NEH: This program is designed to be very flexible and to allow you to apply for the kind of funding you want, when you need it. The program will also have a cool new feature, again based on lots of feedback we’ve received. It is called Sustainability Match. The idea is that if your project is about sustaining an important digital project that is widely used by the field, you can get an extra level of funding provided you can raise matching funds from your institution or another non-federal source.

​Digital Extension Grants (ACLS) 

• Deadline: February
• Awards are for up to $150,000.
• This program supports digitally based research projects in all disciplines of the humanities and related social sciences. It is hoped that these grants will help advance the digital transformation of humanities scholarship by extending the reach of existing digital projects to new communities of users.

Sparks! Ignition Grants for Libraries

• Deadline: February
• Awards are for up to one year.  Awards range from $10,000 to $25,000.
• Sparks! Ignition Grants for Libraries are a special funding opportunity within the IMLS National Leadership Grants for Libraries program. These small grants encourage libraries and archives to test and evaluate specific innovations in the ways they operate and the services they provide. Sparks Grants support the deployment, testing, and evaluation of promising and groundbreaking new tools, products, services, or organizational practices. You may propose activities or approaches that involve risk, as long as the risk is balanced by significant potential for improvement in the ways libraries and museums serve their communities.

Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities (NEH)

• Deadline: March, for projects beginning the next October
• Awards are for one to three years. Awards range from $50,000 to $250,000.
• These NEH grants support national or regional (multistate) training programs for scholars and advanced graduate students to broaden and extend their knowledge of digital humanities. The projects may be a single opportunity or offered multiple times to different audiences. Institutes may be as short as a few days and held at multiple locations or as long as six weeks at a single site.

​Digital Projects for the Public (NEH)

• Deadline: June, for projects beginning the next January.
• Awards are for a period of one to three years and may range up to $30,000 (for Discovery grants), up to $100,000 (for Prototyping grants), and up to $400,000 (for Production grants).
• Digital Projects for the Public grants support projects that significantly contribute to the public’s engagement with the humanities. The program offers three levels of support for digital projects: grants for Discovery projects (early-stage planning work), Prototyping projects (proof-of-concept development work), and Production projects (end-stage production and distribution work).

​Research and Development (NEH)

• Deadline: June, for projects beginning the next January.
• Awards are for a period of one to three years and may range up to $75,000 (for Planning and Basic Research), up to $350,000 (for Advanced Implementation), and up to $400,000 (for Production grants).
• The Research and Development program supports projects that address major challenges in preserving or providing access to humanities collections and resources. These challenges include the need to find better ways to preserve materials of critical importance to the nation’s cultural heritage—from fragile artifacts and manuscripts to analog recordings and digital assets subject to technological obsolescence—and to develop advanced modes of organizing, searching, discovering, and using such materials.

NHPRC State Board Programming Grants 

• Deadline: June, for projects beginning the next January
• Awards for one year are up to $40,000, and for two years are up to $80,000.
• The National Historical Publications and Records Commission seeks proposals that strengthen the nation’s archival network through activities undertaken by state historical records advisory boards (SHRABs). The purpose of this grant program is to assist state boards to enhance access to historical records, increase citizen engagement with records, and provide learning and development opportunities for students, citizens and professional archivists.

NHPRC Access to Historical Records 

• Deadline: June for projects beginning the next January
• Awards are for one to two years.  Awards are up to $200,000.
• The National Historical Publications and Records Commission seeks proposals that promote the preservation and use of the nation’s most valuable archival resources. This grant program is designed to support archival repositories in preserving and processing primary source materials. The program emphasizes the creation of online tools that facilitate the public discovery of historical records.

Humanities Open Book Program 

• Deadline: June, for projects beginning the next January.
• Awards are for one to three years. Awards range from $50,000 to $100,000.
• NEH and Mellon are soliciting proposals from academic presses, scholarly societies, museums, and other institutions that publish books in the humanities to participate in the Humanities Open Book Program. Applicants will provide a list of previously published humanities books along with brief descriptions of the books and their intellectual significance. Depending on the length and topics of the books, the number to be digitized may vary. Awards will be given to digitize these books and make them available as Creative Commons-licensed “ebooks” that can be read by the public at no charge on computers, mobile devices, and ebook readers.

Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (NEH)

• Deadline: July, for projects beginning the next May
• The maximum award for implementation projects is $350,000, for up to three years. The maximum award for Foundations projects is $40,000 for up to two years.
• Supports projects that preserve and make accessible important collections of books and manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings and moving images, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, art and material culture, and digital objects.

​CLIR Digitizing Hidden Special Collections 

• Deadline: September, for projects begining the next January
• Awards previously have been one to three years.  Awards previously ranged from $5,000 to $500,000.
• Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Enabling New Scholarship through Increasing Access to Unique Materials is a national competition administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) for digitizing collections of rare and unique content in cultural memory institutions.

OCLC/ALISE Library & Information Science Research Grant 

• Deadline: September
• Awards are for one year research projects.  Awards range up to $15,000.
• In recognition of the importance of research to the advancement of librarianship and information science, OCLC and ALISE promote independent research that helps integrate new technologies that offer innovative approaches and contributes to a better understanding of the information environment and user expectations and behaviors.

Higher Education and Scholarship in the Humanities (Mellon)

• Deadline: Ongoing, Inquiry then Invitation
• Awards vary.
• The Foundation’s grants to leading research universities and institutes for advanced study seek to help institutions train the next generation of faculty in the humanities, strengthen humanities research, and renew and broaden disciplines, research areas, and curricula. Grants may be given to Research Universities and Institutes, Liberal Arts Colleges, and Consortia, but also to graduate students. The Mellon Foundation only accepts grant proposals by invitation; before sending any material, send a brief inquiry by email to hesh@mellon.org.

​NHPRC State Government Electronic Records

• Deadline: December, for projects beginning the next July
• Awards are for one to three years.  Awards are up to $200,000.
• The National Historical Publications and Records Commission seeks projects that will accession, describe, preserve, and provide access to state government electronic records of enduring value. Government information maintained by state archives are national assets, serving as important resources for documenting rights and capturing the national experience. The NHPRC will support projects that actively engage in activities that preserve electronic record assets and make them available for public discovery. (This grant does NOT cover digitization.)

NHPRC Literacy and Engagement with Historical Records

• Deadline: December, for projects beginning the next July
• Awards are for one to three years.  Awards range from $50,000 to $150,000.
• The National Historical Publications and Records Commission seeks projects that explore ways to improve digital literacy and encourage citizen engagement with historical records. The Literacy and Engagement grant program offers support for projects that will result in archives reaching audiences through digital literacy programs and workshops, new tools and applications, and citizen engagement in archival processes.

NHPRC Digital Dissemination of Archival Collections

• Deadline: December, for projects beginning the next July
• Awards are for one to two years.  Awards range from $20,000 to $150,000.
• The National Historical Publications and Records Commission desires to make historical records of national significance to the United States broadly available by disseminating digital surrogates on the Internet. Projects may focus on the papers of major figures from American life or cover broad historical movements in politics, military, business, social reform, the arts, and other aspects of the national experience. The historical value of the records and their expected usefulness to broad audiences must justify the costs of the project.

Mellon Arts and Cultural Heritage

• Deadline: Ongoing, Inquiry then Invitation
• Awards vary.
• The Arts and Cultural Heritage program supports the work of outstanding artists, curators, conservators, and scholars, and endeavors to strengthen performing arts organizations, art museums, research institutes, and conservation centers. Grants are given in several areas, including Art History, Conservation, and Museums. The Mellon Foundation only accepts grant proposals by invitation; before sending any material, send a brief inquiry by email to ach@mellon.org.

​Mellon Foundation Scholarly Communication 

• Deadline: Ongoing, Inquiry then Invitation
• Awards vary.
• The Scholarly Communications program promotes the common good by supporting the creation, dissemination, use, and preservation of original sources, interpretive scholarship in the humanities, and other scholarly and artistic materials. The grants are given in the areas of Electronic Publishing, Preservation and Conservation, and Access and Use. The Mellon Foundation only accepts grant proposals by invitation; before sending any material, send a brief inquiry by email to sc@mellon.org.

​Sloan Foundation Data and Computational Research 

• Deadline: Ongoing, Inquiry then Invitation
• Grants in this sub-program aim to help researchers develop tools, establish norms, and build the institutional and social infrastructure needed to take full advantage of these important developments in data-driven, computation-intensive research. Emphasis is placed on projects that encourage access to and sharing of scholarly data, that promote the development of standards and taxonomies necessary for the interoperability of datasets, that enable the replication of computational research, and that investigate models of how researchers might deal with the increasingly central role played by data management and curation. The Sloan Foundation does not accept unsolicited grant proposals; for information on how to submit a letter of inquiry, visit: http://www.sloan.org/apply-for-grants/letters-of-inquiry/.

​Sloan Foundation Scholarly Communication

• Deadline: Ongoing, Inquiry then Invitation
• Grants in this sub-program aim to ease this transition by supporting the development of new models of filtering and curating online scholarly materials and by engaging the emerging community of stakeholders and practitioners tackling similar issues in widely divergent disciplinary contexts. The Sloan Foundation does not accept unsolicited grant proposals; for information on how to submit a letter of inquiry, visit: http://www.sloan.org/apply-for-grants/letters-of-inquiry/.

​Sloan Foundation Universal Access to Knowledge

• Deadline: Ongoing, Inquiry then Invitation
• The goal of the Universal Access to Knowledge program is to facilitate the openness and accessibility of all knowledge in the digital age for the widest public benefit under reasonable financial terms and conditions. The Sloan Foundation does not accept unsolicited grant proposals; for information on how to submit a letter of inquiry, visit: http://www.sloan.org/apply-for-grants/letters-of-inquiry/.

Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry 
a Mellon funded partnership between Grinnell College and The University of Iowa
funding: Summer Collaborative Grants, Technology Grants, Pedagogy Grants

Faculty Cluster Initiatives
a series of cluster hiring initiatives that facilitate multidisciplinary scholarship, instruction, and public service – the Studio works closely with three:

• Informatics
• Public Digital Arts
• Public Humanities in a Digital World

History Corps 
a graduate student-led, online digital and oral history project based out of the Department of History at the University of Iowa

Iowa Digital Engagement and Learning (IDEAL)
a joint initiative of the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education and the Rhetoric Department that works with instructors to devise resources and develop projects that make classroom innovation easier

NEXUS of Engineering and Art Program
a program to promote and support collaborations between artists and engineers on campus as they address creative challenges

Obermann Center for Advanced Studies
programmatic support for a major annual humanities conference, small group collaborations, an intensive seminar for graduate students, as well as University-community activities, including lectures, workshops, and performances
funding: Various programs

Office of Teaching, Learning & Technology (OTLT)
supports, develops, and encourages faculty and TA professional teaching and learning strategies, including support for a wide variety of instructional technology solutions and expert assessment consulting and resources
funding: Innovation in Teaching Using Technology Awards (ITTA)

• Center for Teaching (CfT)
• Student Instructional Technology Assistants (SITA)

 

Public Digital Humanities Certificate
a certificate for graduate students interested in learning the theory and application of digital approaches to the humanities.

Research and Library Instruction (RLI)
promotes the development of critical thinking and research skills, and supports research, teaching, and learning through our user-centered services including: cne-on-one research consultations, innovative instructional services, subject specialists, and chat & e-mail reference

UI Protolabs
a multi-facility prototyping resource at the University of Iowa open to faculty, students and staff, startups, businesses, and the general public