The Institute of Museum and Library Services released application guidelines for the Fiscal Year 2017 round of National Leadership Grants for Libraries (NLG). These grants “support projects that address significant challenges and opportunities facing the library and archive fields and that have the potential to advance theory and practice. Successful proposals will generate results such as new tools, research findings, models, services, practices, or alliances that will be widely used, adapted, scaled, or replicated to extend the benefits of federal investment.” Award range from up to $25,000 for Sparks Grants, to up to $2,000,000 for Project or Research Grants.
IMLS has published tips for preparing a competitive preliminary proposal, as well as a series of helpful posts “drawing attention to key points in the Notices of Funding Opportunities” for the grants.
From the “project categories” descriptions:
1. Community Anchors: We are interested in projects that advance the role of libraries as community anchors that provide civic and cultural engagement, facilitate lifelong learning, promote digital inclusion, and support economic vitality through programming and services. The benefits of projects and programs must not be limited to the local community but also advance national practice.
2. National Digital Platform: We are interested in projects that create, develop, and expand the open source software applications used by libraries and archives to provide digital content and services to all users in the United States.
3. Curating Collections: We are interested in projects that can have a significant national impact on shared services for the preservation and management of digital library collections and content across the country. Projects focused on preserving or providing access to a particular collection or set of collections cannot be supported. Similarly, the program cannot support the digitization of content or pre-digitization activities such as inventorying collections.
Preliminary proposals are due on September 1.
