The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has received a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant, which will be spread out over four years, will help fund research into ways of closing the “digital divide” in higher education and ensuring that scholarly works are distributed as broadly as possible. The research is part of a collaborative project among the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, the University Library, the Department of African American Studies, and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. The project is specifically designed to help scholars determine the best options for publishing their works digitally, whether their interest is disseminating their research as broadly as possible, achieving tenure, or exploring multimedia and other non-print formats for presenting research. The University’s Scholarly Commons, which assists faculty with research and technology needs, will serve as the hub of the digital-publishing effort and will also examine ways in which digital works can be preserved.
The hope is that the project can produce a model for other colleges and universities to follow in identifying the research and publishing needs of their own faculty. To this end, the research effort will produce a set of “best practices” covering all stages of the publishing process. As part of the “Humanities Without Walls” initiative, also funded by the Mellon Foundation, researchers will work to ensure that institutions of higher education that have historically served African-Americans and other minority groups can benefit from these new guidelines. Other research institutions that focus on African-American studies, including museums and professional associations, will be included in the outreach. Although the overall focus of the project is on digital publishing, participants will also work with university presses to explore ways in which authors can switch back and forth between digital and print formats.
For more information on the grant and the digital-publishing initiative, go here. To learn about the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s broader work to promote scholarly communications, click here.