Announcing New NEH-IMLS Partnership: Libraries & Museums Advance the Digital Humanities

This fall, the Office of Digital Humanities will release application guidelines for our newest program, Digital Humanities Advancement Grants, which will have its first deadline on January 11, 2017. This program will combine the features of two previous NEH programs, Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants and Digital Humanities Implementation Grants. As part of this new program, we are also pleased to announce a new partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services that will extend both agencies’ ability to support important digital humanities initiatives and help to further foster the leadership roles that library and museum professionals play in the digital humanities.

Under this new partnership, we are encouraging applications that involve innovative collaborations between museum or library professionals and humanities professionals to advance preservation, access, use, and engagement with digital collections and services. IMLS funds may support Level I and II projects (further described in the to-be-released guidelines) ranging from $5,000-$75,000 that support IMLS’s National Digital Platform funding.

For many years, ODH has funded a variety of exciting humanities projects that bring together scholars and students with collaborators from libraries, museums, and archives. For instance, the recently funded Immigrant Stories project, based at the University of Minnesota’s Immigration History Research Center, is partnering with institutions such as the Arab American National Museum and the Minnesota Digital Library to create and preserve digital narratives reflecting the experiences of recent immigrants to the United States. A 2013 grant to Indiana University’s Black Film Center/Archive supported a two-day conference and workshop exploring how digital tools could better capture aspects of film of interest to humanities scholars.

With this new partnership, which echoes the previous NEH-IMLS partnership in the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants category between 2007-2009, we hope to support even more projects like these, as well as others that explore the possibilities at the intersection of cultural heritage, humanities, and technology. Please watch for the program guidelines (due in late August 2016) or contact us at @email with questions about potential applications.