Advancing Knowledge: The IMLS/NEH Digital Partnership

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) invite proposals for innovative, collaborative humanities projects using the latest digital technologies for the benefit of the American public, humanities scholarship, and the nation's cultural institutions. These grants require substantive collaborations among libraries, museums, archives, universities, and other cultural organizations. Grants support projects that explore new ways to share, examine, and interpret humanities collections in a digital environment; that develop new uses and audiences for existing digital resources; or that result in extensible and transferable methodologies or tools. Eligible projects might: advance the role of cultural repositories in online teaching, learning, and research for public audiences, teachers, students, and scholars; develop collaborative approaches involving the scholarly community and cultural repositories for the creation, preservation, use, and presentation of reusable digital collections and products; use innovative approaches in digital technology to provide new perspectives on humanities resources or offer new interpretive contexts for scholars, students, and public audiences; or examine and coordinate community-based approaches and standards for making resources available online and allowing them to be widely shared. Successful applicants will be required to create a "lessons learned" white paper, which will be posted on the NEH or IMLS Web sites. This white paper should document the project and present lessons learned in a candid manner so that others can benefit from the project. In order to facilitate dissemination and the maximum usage of the products that are ultimately developed through Advancing Knowledge Grants, applicants are strongly encouraged to base their projects on open source and fully accessible software.