18.090 NEH Request for Proposals

                Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 90.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2004 06:40:01 +0100
         From: "Laura Gottesman" <lgot_at_LOC.GOV>
         Subject: Request for Proposals--Cooperative Agreements: National
Digital Newspaper Program

Please excuse any cross postings:

The National Endowment for the Humanities: Division of Preservation and Access

Request for Proposals--Cooperative Agreements for Phase One of the National
Digital Newspaper Program (A Partnership between NEH and the Library off
Congress)

URL: http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/ndnp.html

Program Overview

·Award amount: up to $500,000
·Deadline for submission: September 1, 2004 for letter of intent; October
1, 2004 for receipt of applications
·Award announcement: April 2005
·Grant period: 2 years beginning May 2005

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is soliciting proposals
from institutions to participate in the development of a test bed for the
National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). Ultimately, over a period of
approximately 20 years, NDNP will create a national, digital resource of
historically significant newspapers from all the states and U.S.
territories published between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will
be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress (LC) and be freely
accessible via the Internet. An accompanying national newspaper directory
of bibliographic and holdings information on the website will direct users
to newspaper titles available in all types of formats. LC will also
digitize and contribute to the NDNP database a significant number of
newspaper pages drawn from its own collections during the course of this
partnership between NEH and the Library.

NDNP will be implemented in several phases. After the completion of the
test bed, the Endowment intends to support additional projects in all
states and U.S. territories, provided that sufficient funds allocated for
this purpose are available. One organization within each U.S. state or
territory will receive an award to collaborate with relevant state partners
in this effort. Previously funded projects will be eligible for continued
support to digitize pages from new decades, as the program increases its
chronological span.

Successful applicants for the initial developmental phase of NDNP will
select newspapers published in English within their state from 1900 through
1910 and convert, primarily from microfilm, over a period of two years, a
minimum of 100,000 pages into digital files, according to the technical
guidelines outlined by the Library of Congress. Up to 20,000 of these
pages may be drawn from previously digitized titles, provided that the
content meets the selection criteria for the program. Awardees will also be
expected to contribute to the evaluation by NEH and LC of the program's
future selection criteria, the technical specifications and requirements of
the program, and the effectiveness of NDNP's initial interface for browsing
and searching newspaper pages.

NDNP builds on the foundation established by an earlier NEH initiative: the
United States Newspaper Program (USNP). Since 1982, the Endowment has
supported a cooperative, national effort to locate, catalog, and preserve
on microfilm American newspapers published from the 18th century to the
present. NEH has funded newspaper projects in all the fifty states, the
District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. When completed
in 2007, USNP will have provided bibliographic control to widely scattered
newspapers and have preserved on microfilm (to consistent national
standards) selected titles from this vulnerable corpus. LC has provided
technical assistance for the USNP since its inception.

NEH expects to award up to ten, two-year cooperative agreements (of up to
$500,000 each), depending on the availability of funds. The Guidelines for
the Request for Proposals are located at:
http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/ndnp.html. LC's technical guidelines
are found at: http://www.loc.gov/ndnp/ndnp_techguide.pdf .

Deadlines:

          * September 1, 2004: By this date, applicants must submit a
letter indicating their intent to apply. The letter should list the
institutions that would be partners in the project as well as any
consultants from other institutions or organizations that will be involved
in the project's activities.

          * October 1, 2004: Applications must be received by NEH.

For information about the application process, contact the Division of
Preservation and Access at 202-606-8570 or e-mail at preservation_at_neh.gov.
The postal address is:

National Digital Newspaper Program
Division of Preservation and Access
Room 411
National Endowment for the Humanities
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20506

Hearing-impaired applicants can contact NEH via TDD at 1-866-372-2930.

All questions relating to the technical guidelines should be directed to LC
staff at ndnptech_at_loc.gov.

To obtain a print-version of the guidelines, call 202-606-8446, send an
e-mail to info_at_neh.gov, or write NEH, Office of Public Affairs, 1100
Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20506.
Received on Sat Jul 24 2004 - 02:02:17 EDT