Grants to USA nonprofit institutions and organizations, academic institutions, local and state government agencies, and Native American groups and tribes to digitally preserve historical collections related to BIPOC cultures. Applicants are advised that required registrations may take several weeks to complete. Applications from and collaborations involving Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), and Tribal Colleges are strongly encouraged.
The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), with funding provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, seeks proposals for its new program for Collaborative Digital Editions in African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American History. With an overarching goal to broaden participation in the production and publication of historical and scholarly digital editions, the Start-Up grants program is designed to:
- Provide opportunities that augment the preparation and training of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) new to the work of historical documentary editing, especially those currently working in history or related area and ethnic studies departments.
- Encourage and support the innovative and collaborative re-thinking of the historical and scholarly digital edition itself—how it is conceived, whose voices it centers, and for what purposes.
- Encourage and support the early planning and development of significant, innovative, and well-conceived digital edition projects rooted in African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American history and ethnic studies.
- Stimulate meaningful, mutually beneficial, and respectful collaborations that help to bridge longstanding institutional inequalities by promoting resource sharing and capacity building at all levels, and that build into their plans a variety of means for achieving meaningful community and user input and engagement.
Eligible projects in this category typically focus on collecting, describing, preserving, compiling, transcribing, annotating, editing, encoding, and publishing original manuscript or typewritten documents, and/or historical records in other formats, such as analog audio and/or born-digital records.
Eligible activities in this category may include:
- Travel and related costs for planning meetings (intended for geographically dispersed collaborations).
- Relevant training for project directors and staff, including but not limited to NHPRC-supported training opportunities through its Institutes for Historical Editing program.
- Associated costs for technical planning, wire-framing, and testing and evaluation with the target audience(s) to determine needs and priorities.
For projects undertaking an extensive or supplementary document search, funds also may be used for initial surveying of collections, document imaging and collection, canvassing, community outreach, and related travel.