Smathers Libraries Grants Program

Welcome to the Smathers Libraries Grants Program LibGuide! The Smathers Libraries Grants Program supports activities related to the submission and management of grant funds awarded to library faculty and staff. Explore these resources to assist in finding valuable information about funding opportunities, developing proposals, and managing funded awards.

Become a grant reviewer! Here are just a few ways to get involved with federal agency and other sponsors and contribute your professional expertise to the profession. It's a great way to learn more about the world of grants!

Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)

Lyrasis Catalyst Fund

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)

National Endowment for the Humanities

National Science Foundation (NSF) 

Merit Review: Why You Should Volunteer to Serve As An NSF Reviewer: https://www.nsf.gov/bfa/dias/policy/merit_review/reviewer.jsp#3 

USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA)

US Dept. of Education: Various calls for peer reviewers are posted as funding becomes available; see this example: https://oese.ed.gov/2022-call-for-peer-reviewers/

The Grants Activities Update is a monthly report produced by the Smathers Libraries Grants Management Program to keep our community informed about the status of ongoing grant projects. Proposals are tracked and categorized by whether they have been recently submitted, recently awarded, recently declined, pending, or active. The purpose of the report is to provide sufficient and transparent information about the status of all proposals. Information includes the title of the project, amount requested, amount contributed as cost share, proposal abstract, project team members, start and end dates, sponsor name and program, and a link to the full proposal hosted in the UF Institutional Repository.

Florida Ethnic and Under-Represented Communities Digital Newspaper Project – (Cash: $275,743; cost share: $49,351) The University of Florida requests $275,743 to select, digitize and make available to the Library of Congress approximately 100,000 historic newspaper pages through the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). Titles for digitization will be selected for their ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious, and geographic diversity to better reflect Florida history in the first half of the twentieth century. Areas of focus include significant multilingual papers from counties unrepresented in Chronicling America; Cuban papers from Miami and Tampa; Jewish newspapers from Jacksonville; and papers from Tarpon Springs, an area with a significant Greek population. These electronic resources will provide context and support for research into the historical basis of racial issues that continue today and seem particularly relevant with current scholarly and public discussions. (Project team: P. Reakes (PI), M. Jerome (Co-PI), with S. Tew, L. Perry, A. Charnas, D. Durden, N. St. Croix, P. Collins (Start date: 09/01/2023; end date: 08/31/2025) National Digital Newspaper Program – National Endowment for the Humanities

Establishing evidence-based recommendations for high impact open access publishing of UF research  – (Cash: $110,745; cost share: $0) Does making academic work openly available increase the positive impact of that work? Does the type of open access publishing influence that impact? Scholars have numerous choices when deciding how best to share results of their research. This study aims to inform those choices, providing evidence-based recommendations to maximize the impact of disseminating scholarship to targeted audiences and comply with funders’ public access mandates. In this study, we will use UF IFAS research as a basis for a cited references analysis, starting with citing works and working backwards to identify publishing models used. The innovative research design will use both quantitative and qualitative methods to assess achievement of dissemination goals. Quantitative citation data from Dimensions, Scopus, and Web of Science will be analyzed, as well as the impact of non-traditional dissemination as measured by Altmetrics attention scores. Qualitative data from author surveys and focus groups will enrich the understanding of scholars’ publishing decisions as a function of intended audience, funding agency expectations, and other factors. Outputs of this project include recommendations for UF faculty to effectively disseminate scholarship, maximizing the impact of their research and their research dollars. Analytical methods developed from credible data sources can be modified for use by a variety of disciplines and useful in comparison of UF research to peer institutions. (Project team: T. Cataldo (PI), S. Stapleton (Co-PI), Sadie Hundemer (Co-PI) (IFAS, Agricultural Education and Communication). (Start date: 07/01/2023; end date: 6/30/2025) Libraries Research Seed Grant

Preserving the Journalistic Recordings of Burning Spear Media, 1971-1999 – (Cash: $49,751) The George A. Smathers Libraries (Libraries), University of Florida, and Burning Spear Media, LLC, will partner to digitize and make publicly accessible 1495+ audio and video recordings dating back to 1971. These media document the history of the Black Power struggle through activities of the Uhuru Movement. Recordings include conferences, workshops, Freedom Schools, Sunday Meetings, homeless activism, protest marches, speeches, electoral campaign activities, and activists’ personal accounts. Collection content includes 12 sessions of the International Tribunal on Reparations to Black People in the U.S., Huey Newton’s last speeches, and presentations by Omali Yeshitela in London and Africa. Recordings chronicle the survival, continuity and growth of the movement for Black Power and African Internationalism from 1971 to 1999.The Libraries will ingest and preserve these recordings, making them freely available through UF’s Digital Collections, offering rare resources for current and future generations of students, activists, journalists, film-makers, historians and the general public. (Project team: A. Hines (PI), J. Hofer (Co-PI)) (Start date: 9/1/2023; end date: 8/31/2024) Recordings at Risk – CLIR

SEC Faculty Travel Program - (Cash: $2,080) The SEC Faculty Travel Program aims to foster relationships that stimulate collaboration between SEC member universities relative to exchanging ideas, developing grant proposals, presenting lectures, conducting research, and delivering performances. Florence M. Turcotte is proposing a research trip to Vanderbilt University to do research at the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries to consult with Mary McSparran, Curator of Manuscripts and conduct research in the Edwin Mims and the Andrew Nelson Lytle concerning her book project about the literary relationships of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. (Start date: 11/14/2023; end date: 11/19/2024) (Project team: F. Turcotte) SEC Faculty Travel Program  

Health Impacts of Lead Exposure: Enhance, Engage, & Empower Community Awareness – (Cash: $6,288) The goals of this project are to increase community and health professional awareness of the health impacts of lead toxicity, increase public access to reliable health information to help community members make informed decisions relating to their health, and increase knowledge of National Library of Medicine resources, such as MedlinePlus, NLM Reading Club, and PubMed Central in the local community. Project activities will complement a National Library of Medicine (NLM) traveling exhibit scheduled for HSCL this fall, and include community outreach in collaboration with the Alachua County Library District.(Project team: S. Meyer (PI), M. Edwards, C. Pyche, N. Stoyan-Rozenzweig)(Start date: 5/1/2023; end date: 4/30/2024) Region 2 Innovation Impact – NNLM

Reimagining Jewish Life in the Modern Middle East – (Cash: $6,739) The team proposes a large-scale collaborative project to rewrite the histories, narratives, and memories of and by Jews in the Middle East in the 19th- 21st centuries. Drawing on original primary sources in numerous languages, diverse interdisciplinary approaches, and creative synthesis of the recent scholarship, they reframe Jews at the center of the modern Middle East and globe rather than on its margins. By analyzing, historicizing, and contextualizing the multifaceted processes of minoritization and sectarianization that took place in different contexts (imperial, colonial, national) beginning in mid-19th century, they examine the overlapping ways that Jews were both incorporated into and excluded from Middle Eastern polities and societies. Joe Aufmuth will create a number of maps for the special journal and book and will also help create thematic GIS storymaps for the website. Most significantly, he will help design and create an interactive map for the project website that will allow visitors to ‘walk’ through various Jewish spaces.(Project Team: Michelle Campus (PI) (Pennsylvania State University), J. Aufmuth (Co-PI)) (Start date:10/01/2021; end date: 9/30/2024) Collaborative Research - National Endowment for the Humanities   

Enhancing Student Learning through a Campus-Wide Podcasting Studio – (Cash: $30,553) The George A. Smathers Libraries request $30,553 to purchase state-of-the-art podcasting equipment to establish a campus-wide podcasting studio for students to be located at the Marston Science Library (MSL). Podcasting provides students the opportunity to share their voices widely. It is an engaging tool that students can use to deliver content to a wide audience in short, meaningful segments. It also allows students to build their self confidence in speaking and sharing their knowledge with others. Because podcasts are freely available and can be shared university-wide, they can also serve as open educational resources (OER) to engage with leadership themes in a way that is accessible, practical, and relevant. For students, podcast creation provides an experiential learning opportunity in multiple arenas, including script writing, interviewing, narration, recording, and audio production/editing. Student-led podcasts could serve as a capstone project, a modern final assessment, a professional marketing tool, or simply a personal creative endeavor. (Project team: M. Nolan (PI), J. Bossart (Co-PI), J. Williams) (Start date: 8/1/2023; end date: 1/31/2024) Technology Fee Academic Innovation Grant – University of Florida