Grants and Fellowships: Funding Opportunities: Home

Award- dLOC as Data (subaward to the Libraries: $14,209) P0153761 The project team, in partnership with Florida International University (applicant), seeks to enhance access to its existing Caribbean newspaper collections by making texts available for bulk download to its users. The team will demonstrate the potential of newspaper data by creating a pilot thematic toolkit focused on hurricanes and tropical cyclones. Andrew W. Mellon Foundation – Collections as Data: Part to Whole

Award- Making Florida Newspaper Collections Accessible (cash: $53,040; cost share: $21,443) In partnership with the state’s five Multitype Library Consortia, and the Manatee Public Library, the project team plans to broaden the historical and geographical coverage of the Florida Digital Newspaper Library (FDNL) hosted by the Libraries, by providing public digital access to an additional 200,000 pages of pre-1925, Florida historical newspapers. This project will 1) select and digitally convert up to 201 reels of microfilm containing 33 titles, representing 15 Florida counties, to a digital format; 2) ingest the digitized items into the UF Florida Digital Newspaper Library (FDNL); 3) provide statewide training to library personnel on how to access and use FDNL, focusing on the newly digitized historic titles as examples of unique primary resources available through this collection; 4) create an online training resource in English and Spanish based on statewide trainings; 5) provide redundant storage for the collection’s preservation in perpetuity; 6) conduct pre- and post-training surveys for training participants; 7) publicize and promote newly digitized items and the FDNL to the citizens of Florida; and, 8) offer new digital files to the State Library for use in Florida Memory, and other repositories. Florida Division of Library and Information Services. Florida Division of Library and Information Services – Library Technology and Information Act 

Award - Film on a Boat: Digitizing Historical Newspapers of the Caribbean (cash: $434,124; cost share: $28,448) This three-year project in partnership with the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras (UPR) plans to digitize each institution’s unique, hidden holdings of Caribbean newspapers on master microfilm. The team will digitize and make freely available 800,000 pages of pre-1923 Caribbean newspapers. The partners will produce new second generation microfilm negatives; catalog individual titles; conduct issue-level collation; send to a vendor for digitization, creation of derivative files, and OCR text files; perform quality control on deliverables; and ingest into the Digital Library of the Caribbean and the Biblioteca Digital Puertorriqueña. Once available digitally, these resources will provide scholars with access to previously unavailable information on daily life in the Caribbean to enable new research and research questions from a variety of fields and disciplines on cross-cutting issues including migration, social movements, history, and literature. Selected materials were published in: Antigua, The Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Guyana, St. Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, and Puerto Rico.Council on Library and Information Resources - Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives

Award - Educating for Reproducibility: Pathways to Research Integrity ($44,893) The project team proposes to host a conference focusing on reproducibility education and training at all levels of education, from undergraduate to continuing education for principal investigators. The team seeks to bring together educators, researchers, and administrators from a wide range of disciplines and institutions to discuss the challenges, opportunities, and existing programmatic examples in reproducibility education and outreach. Department of Health & Human Services - Announcement of the Availability of Funds for Conferences on Research Integrity

Award- Documenting History: Farmworkers in Florida during COVID-19 (cash: $3,500; cost share: $3,372) The purpose of this project is to create an archive of snapshots of relevant digital content that capture the impact that COVID 19 is having on farmworkers in Florida. It is part of the Florida Latin American and Caribbean Diaspora Initiative at the University of Florida’s Latin American and Caribbean Collection, which has the goal to identify, document, preserve, and provide access to the experience of Latin American and Caribbean immigrants in the state. It began with existing documents at the Libraries; it is now moving in the direction of community-driven collections. The project seeks to capture digital content considered as ephemeral, but that captures the voices, experiences, and opinions of people who are frequently marginalized and underrepresented, such as that of the Mexican, Central American, and Haitian farmworkers who live and work in Florida. The project will document the challenges that COVID 19 has presented them, as well as the innovative ways in which they adapt and survive. In the current environment, the mission of challenging and correcting the misrepresentation of immigrants is crucial. The resulting collection will be freely accessible to a global audience in the Latin American and Caribbean Collection website, and like its precedents --The Cuban American Dream Timeline and The Haitian American Dream Timeline (to be released in fall 2020)—it will be featured in the cluster of courses connected to the Intersections Group on Global Blackness and Latinx Identity. UF Center for Art, Migration+Entrepreneurship 

Award- Caribbean Voices: Connecting People and Sharing Stories (round 2 submission) – ($3,372 cash) In partnership with the Pan Caribbean Sankofa, Inc., the project team proposes two public humanities programs, to be held concurrently in UF and Panama in April 2021, to examine the history and lives of the Caribbean people who lived and worked in the former Panama Canal Zone and in Panama. The programs will address the importance of identity, community, religion, language, and culture in the face of the Caribbean diaspora and the segregation and racism faced in Panama and the U.S. The programs will feature a combination of exhibits, speaker panels, a documentary film screening, and community engagement activities focused on historical photos and oral history interviews. In addition to raising awareness about the lives and roles of these Caribbean people, the programs are intended to foster dialogue between the academic community and the dispersed Caribbean communities. These public engagement opportunities will provide forums for Caribbean people to share their voices, perspectives, and experiences as a marginalized community and also as people of great intelligence, expertise, professionalism, good character, and high morale in spite of discrimination and racism. Center for the Humanities & the Public Sphere – Programs in the Public Humanities 
 

Award - Migration, Mobility, and Sustainability: Caribbean Studies and Digital Humanities (cash: $231,093; cost share: $6,639) This project team in partnership with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) seeks to host a week-long, in-person workshop and five additional monthly virtual workshops on collaborative Digital Humanities (DH) and Caribbean Studies. Participants, especially from under-resourced institutions and those with preservation concerns, will gain DH teaching experience and in-depth knowledge of how to utilize digital collections in teaching. The Institute will provide training in tools, processes, and resources for developing lessons, modules, and/or courses. Twenty-six participants will achieve: 1) acquisition of concrete digital skills and DH approaches for teaching and research utilizing Open Access digital collections; 2) participation in an enhanced community of practice for DH; and, 3) creation of Open Access course and teaching materials that blend DH and Caribbean Studies. ) NEH - Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities

Award - Repositioning Florida’s Judaica Library: Increasing Access to Humanities Resources from Florida, Latin America, and the Caribbean Communities – ($500,000 matching grant) The project team plans to raise $1.5 million in the next four years to endow acquisitions, public and scholarly outreach activities, and collaborative digitization projects related to the Jewish experience in Florida, Latin America, and the Caribbean. With the Price Library of Judaica and the Digital Library of the Caribbean partnerships as the project’s underpinnings, UF is uniquely prepared to lead a national and international effort to inspire greater study of the Jewish diaspora. The expanded and enhanced Judaica collections and services will be the foundation for the American portal of Florida, Latin American and Caribbean Jewry, and will emphasize the importance of scholarship, preservation, and access to these exceptional resources. National Endowment for the Humanities – Challenge Grant Program

Welcome to the UF Libraries' Grants and Fellowships Opportunities LibGuide! These resources will help you search and find valuable information about: deadlines, funding agencies, books, articles, and tools for supporting your grants seeking activities.

From my perspective, grantsmanship includes the process by which an idea is converted to a story about an opportunity to fill a gap, or eliminate a need, or solve a problem, or research new ways to do these things. If the “story” gets funded, dollars provide the fuel to actualize the idea. Grantseeking, to do it well, requires a series of systems within an organization that supports its grantseekers in every aspect of the process. Searching for grant opportunities, and reading grant guidelines should be continuous. Activities for brainstorming fundable ideas should be regular occurrences. Workshops on specific funding opportunities should be provided to potential organization grantseekers. Assistance in developing project teams and identifying organizational assets that can contribute to the development of grant project idea should be organized and supported. Working with partners on collaborative grantseeking opportunities should be the norm, not the exception. Providing coordinated post award management assistance to bring awarded projects to successful completion ensures that the project team has necessary support for all of the various changes that occur during a project’s grant period.
 

So this work is essentially one of the most creative and rewarding activities on the planet. It offers a chance to organize words and numbers into cohesive ideas that attract the interest of investors (funders or sponsors) who provide funds to change people’s lives. I consider it a privilege to work in this field…planting seeds…watching crops grow to maturity…and facilitating the actualization of dreams.

Bess de Farber, July 2020

Bess de Farber serves as Grants Manager for the University of Florida Libraries, and previously served in the same position at the University of Arizona Libraries. She has provided grantsmanship instruction throughout the past 30 years, and has led efforts to secure millions in grant funding for nonprofits and academic libraries. De Farber has secured millions of dollars in grant awards for nonprofit organizations and academic libraries. Her research interest is asset-based collaboration development. As a certified professional facilitator through the International Association of Facilitators, she invented the CoLAB Planning Series®, large group processes, for individuals and organizations seeking new collaborative partnerships. This process has served more than 3,500 individuals since 2002. De Farber has served on grants panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, Education Foundation of Palm Beach County, Arizona State Technology Research Initiative Fund Awards, and The Children’s Trust (Dade County). As program officer for the Community Foundation of Palm Beach and Martin Counties and Palm Beach County Cultural Council she managed the allocation of funds for arts and culture, human and race relations, and social services. She holds a Master of Nonprofit Management from Florida Atlantic University, and Bachelor of Music from the University of Southern California. She is the author of Collaborative Grant-Seeking: A Practical Guide for Librarians (2016), and co-author of Collaborating with Strangers: Facilitating Workshops in Libraries, Classes, and Nonprofits (2017). De Farber’s latest book, Creating Fundable Grant Proposals: Profiles of Innovative Partnerships will be released in 2020.