Program Description
The Humanities Open Book Program is designed to make outstanding out-of-print humanities books available to a wide audience. By taking advantage of low-cost “ebook” technology, the program will allow teachers, students, scholars, and the public to read humanities books that have long been out of print. Humanities Open Book is jointly sponsored by NEH and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Traditionally, printed books have been the primary medium for expressing, communicating, and debating humanistic ideas. However, the vast majority of humanities books sell a small number of copies and then quickly go out of print. Most scholarly books printed since 1923 are not in the public domain and are not easily available to the general public. As a result, there is a huge, mostly untapped resource of remarkable scholarship going back decades that is largely unused by today’s scholars, teachers, students, and members of the public, many of whom turn first to the Internet when looking for information. Modern ebook technology can make these books far more accessible than they are today.
NEH and Mellon are soliciting proposals from academic presses, scholarly societies, museums, and other institutions that publish books in the humanities to participate in the Humanities Open Book Program. Applicants will provide a list of previously published humanities books along with brief descriptions of the books and their intellectual significance. Depending on the length and topics of the books, the number to be digitized may vary. However, NEH and Mellon anticipate that applicants may propose to digitize a total that ranges from less than fifty to more than one hundred books. Awards will be given to digitize these books and make them available as Creative Commons-licensed “ebooks” that can be read by the public at no charge on computers, mobile devices, and ebook readers. The final ebook files must be in EPUB version 3.0.1 (or later) format, to ensure that the text is fully searchable and reflowable and that fonts are resizable on any e-reading device.
Applicants are encouraged to form partnerships, if appropriate, when applying. For example, two or more presses could collaborate to bring together books published by their respective institutions on similar themes and topics.
Applicants are required to create an advisory board composed of scholars, librarians, publishers, and other experts to help select the books to digitize. This advisory board should include at least two members from outside the applicant institution.
Applicants are also required to describe a marketing plan designed to spark interest in the newly digitized books. This would likely take the form of new supplementary content about each book to help introduce it to readers today. For example, a press might propose a short marketing essay on its website about a book’s history or reception as a way to engage new readers. Alternatively, a press might propose a longer essay, video, or series of blog entries to help introduce and contextualize a group of books that it is proposing to digitize. The marketing plan might include the involvement of original authors or editors, if appropriate.
Award Information
Awards are for one to three years and range from $50,000 to $100,000. Some projects will receive awards from the NEH, while others will receive awards from the Mellon Foundation. Please see the FAQ document (which is available on the program resource page) for more information.
Cost sharing: Cost sharing consists of the cash contributions made to a project by the applicant and third parties, as well as third party in-kind contributions, such as donated services and goods. Cost sharing is not required for the Humanities Open Book Program. However, applicants are welcome to use cost sharing for projects in which the total budget exceeds the grant limit.
Eligibility
Eligibility is limited to
- U.S. nonprofit organizations with IRS tax-exempt status; and
- state and local governmental agencies and federally recognized Indian tribal governments.
Individuals are not eligible to apply. Degree candidates may not be project directors. Project directors may submit only one application to this program at a time, although they may participate in more than one Humanities Open Book project. They may also apply for other NEH and Mellon awards.
When two or more institutions or organizations collaborate on a project, one of them must serve as the lead applicant and administer the grant on behalf of the others.
NEH generally does not award grants to other federal entities or to applicants whose projects are so closely intertwined with a federal entity that the project takes on characteristics of the federal entity’s own authorized activities. This does not preclude applicants from using grant funds from, or sites and materials controlled by, other federal entities in their projects. Late, incomplete, or ineligible applications will not be reviewed.
How To Prepare Your Application
Prior to submitting a proposal, applicants are encouraged to contact program officers, who can offer advice about preparing the proposal and review draft proposals. These comments are not part of the formal review process and have no bearing on the final outcome of the proposal, but applicants in other programs have found them helpful in strengthening their applications. Program staff recommends that draft proposals be submitted at least six weeks before the deadline. Time constraints may prevent staff from reviewing draft proposals submitted after that date. Draft proposals are optional; if you choose to submit one, send it as an attachment to odh@neh.gov.
You will prepare your application for submission via Grants.gov. Your application should consist of the following parts.
- Table of contents
- List of participants
- Abstract
- Narrative
- Project budget
- Résumés
- Letter(s) of commitment
- List of books and other appendices
How To Submit Your Application
The application must be submitted to Grants.gov. Links to the Grants.gov application package and instructions for preparing and submitting the package can be found on the program resource page. Be sure to read the document (PDF) that explains how to confirm that you successfully submitted your application.
Deadlines
Program staff recommends that draft proposals be submitted at least six weeks before the deadline. Time constraints may prevent staff from reviewing draft proposals submitted after that date. Applications must be received by Grants.gov on or before September 13, 2016. Grants.gov will date- and time-stamp your application after it is fully uploaded. Late applications will not be reviewed.
This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:
http://www.neh.gov/grants/odh/humanities-open-book-program