Grant Funding Opportunities
An update on funding opportunities …
This month, November 2008, we will be releasing a Call for projects for grant funding. Outline details are on the Grant Funding Roadmap. UK FE/HE institutions are eligible to bid, with some types of projects restricted to HEFCE- and HEFCW- funded institutions, due to funding streams.
We’re finalising the Call at the moment, but you won’t go far wrong if you start thinking about what you want to do in:
- implementing automated metadata and textmining
- starting up repositories for research data, research papers, learning materials
- networking and enhancing repositories
- preservation in relation to repositories
- short technical projects to improve repository services
- connections between services to support particular disciplines
Bidders will have until January to prepare proposals, and succesful projects will be expected to start by 1st April 2009.
For those of you most interested in supporting research, please note there will also be a Call for projects related to Virtual Research Environments.
If learning and teaching resources are of particular interest, in December there will also be a Call for the forthcoming HEA/JISC Open Educational Content programme.
Date for your diary: Monday 15th December will be a Briefing Day for anyone who would like to come and hear about the funding opportunities related to the Information Environment and Virtual Research Environment Calls. It will be in Central London, probably 10-4. Details will be released soon.
If you’re not based in UK FE/HE, you may be interested in the Funding Roadmap for Invitations to Tender. These are open to anyone, so if you think you have expertise relevant to the sort of issues reported on this blog, then tenders are very welcome.
We will announce the Call on this blog as soon as it is released.
Records Management 2.0
It’s a sorry thing to admit, but I have to say that reading a whole book has become something of a distant memory for me these days! So … nice to be able to put that right by racing through Steve Bailey’s new book from cover to cover. It’s called ‘Managing the Crowd: Rethinking records management for the Web 2.0 world’.
Records management … a rip-roaring read? Well, I grant you it might not be everyone’s idea of great night in, but for anyone whose waking hours involves thinking about this stuff - I’d recommend you take a look at it.
Steve’s main contention in the book is that if records managers are not prepared to think outside of their comfort zone, they may be in danger of finding themselves no longer in a profession. Processes and procedures will have moved on and those hanging on to the electronic corollary of earlier paper-based working practices will begin to wonder why no-one in their institution is taking any notice of them anymore.
It ties in quite nicely with the soon-to-be-released JISC PoWR (Preservation of Web Resources) Handbook, a section of which addresses the need for a closer working relationship between Records Managers and those with responsibility for institutional websites, and is a timely alert to those institutions to discover what sort of resources they are in danger of losing if they don’t pay attention to web preservation issues.
JISC PoWR blog: http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/