Innovation Grant Winners

I am delighted to announce the recipients of the first awards from the Mellon Foundation – Council on East Asian Libraries Innovation Grants for East Asian Librarians program.  The winners of the 2015 competition are:

Duke University Libraries

Project Lead:  Luo Zhou, Chinese Studies Librarian, in collaboration with Guo-Juin Hong (Asian & Middle Eastern Studies Department, Duke University)

Project:  The Memory Project

Award:  $40,000

This project represents an original contribution in the area of processing, preserving, and making accessible digital primary sources, while also grappling with issues involved in the enhancement of East Asian language AV materials for presentation in an English language context.  Grant funds will be used primarily for the arrangement, description, and reformatting of over 1,000 interviews constituting an oral history of the Great Famine in post-Revolution rural China. 

The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University

Project Lead:  Yunshan Ye, Librarian for East Asian Studies, in collaboration with Jing Zhong (Estelle and Melvin Gelman Library, George Washington University) and Ding Ye (Joseph Mark Lauinger Library, Georgetown University)

Project:  Blogging and Microblogging:  Preserving Non-Official Voices in China’s Anti-Corruption Campaign

Award:  $77,610

This project is an innovative approach in the area of harvesting and making accessible Chinese language social media content, including both blogs and micro-blogs, and the development of an existing open-source tool to allow for the harvesting of Chinese-language content.  Blog and micro-blog content related to the Anti-Corruption campaign in contemporary China will be the focus of this archiving effort.

The two funded projects were selected from a pool of nine applications requesting a total of nearly $500,000.  The two winning projects impressed the review panel with both the importance of the collection development focus and the plans for technology development.  Congratulations to both universities and the project leads and collaborators!

The Mellon Foundation – Council on East Asian Libraries Innovation Grants for East Asian Librarians program was made possible through a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.   The program is managed by the Council on East Asian Libraries (CEAL) and administered by the Association of Asian Studies.  The second grant round of the grant competition will be held in 2016, with the RFP expected in January.

Ellen Hammond

Principal Investigator, Innovation Grants for East Asian Librarians

President, Council on East Asian Libraries