Funding: Collections as Data – Part to Whole

About the funding:

A growing number of cultural heritage organizations have invested in the creation of collections that are amenable to computational use. Increasingly, the concept of collections as data is used to align efforts of this kind. In 2016, Always Already Computational: Collections as Data, supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, began developing the idea that digital collections could be more than digital surrogates of physical items and born digital objects; that digital collections could and should be offered as machine actionable data that are ready for computational research methods. Always Already Computational: Collections as Data demonstrated that librarians, archivists, and museum professionals readily understood the value of this work and were eager to expand the potential use of their collections. While interest is broad, the project found that cultural heritage professionals desired opportunities to further develop approaches to integrating and sustaining collections as data implementation and use as a core organizational activity. Collections as Data: Part to Whole aims to meet this challenge by supporting the development of broadly viable models that support implementation and use of collections as data (see grant narrative)…

With support from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, we will fund 12 teams. 6 teams will be funded in cohort 1. Each team can apply for $30,000 – $80,000. To ensure that project results will be valuable to scholars and sustainable within libraries, we are seeking proposals from collaborative teams jointly led by a librarian with senior administrative responsibilities, a disciplinary scholar, and a project lead.

Read more here.