JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Projects

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The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the United States, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW), acting through the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the United Kingdom, are working together to offer support for digitization projects in the humanities. These grants provide funding for up to eighteen months of development in any of the following areas: new digitization projects and pilot projects, the addition of important materials to existing digitization projects, or the development of infrastructure (either technical “middleware,” tools, or knowledge-sharing) to support digitization work in the United States, England, and Wales. Collaboration between U.S. and English or Welsh institutions is a key requirement for this grant category, based in part on the recommendations for international collaboration in Professor Sir Gareth Roberts’s “International Partnerships of Research Excellence U.K.-U.S.A Academic Collaboration” (25-page PDF) and the report (51-page PDF) of the American Council for Learned Societies’ Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Each application must be sponsored by both an eligible institution in the United States and an eligible English or Welsh institution (see Section III, “Eligibility,” below), and there must be a project director from each institution. The partners will collaborate to write a single application package, which the U.S. partner will submit to NEH (via Grants.gov) and the English or Welsh partner will submit to JISC (via e-mail). All potential applicants should note that while JISC and NEH each host a version of the guidelines on their respective Web sites, the requirements for the application package as outlined in Section IV, “Application and Submission Information,” are identical. However, each set of guidelines does contain some variations in grant administration procedures to be followed by successful applicants, reflecting the local administrative and organizational requirements of the United States and England or Wales. Applications should explain the need for the partnership between the U.S. institution and the English or Welsh institution and provide workable solutions to some of the issues of managing and developing transatlantic collections. Activities supported may include proposing methods to rejoin via digitization “split” humanities collections that currently exist on both sides of the Atlantic; connecting existing split digitized collections, detailing suitable transatlantic standards and communication strategies; creating a virtual archive or resource that would serve as middleware to join complementary materials (analog or digital) in the United States and England or Wales; and developing infrastructure or computational tools for integrating collections and related reference resources (e.g., encyclopedias, dictionaries, gazetteers) to provide contextual information to users. Successful applicants will be expected to create a white paper as one of their work products. This white paper should document the project, including lessons learned, so that others can benefit from their experience.

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