Grants and Acquisitions

Ann-Christe Galloway

Ed. note: Send your grants and acquisitions to Ann-Christe Galloway, production editor, C&RL News, at email: agalloway@ala.org.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the University of Minnesota (UM) a $615,000 grant for Mapping Prejudice, a project of the UM Libraries, started in 2016 by using volunteers to document racial covenants—the clauses that were inserted into property deeds to keep anyone who was not white from buying or occupying certain pieces of land. The funding will allow the Mapping Prejudice team to build collaborations that can advance racial justice in Minnesota. The team will convene a think tank to bring together academics, researchers, and community fellows under the umbrella of the UM Libraries. “Mapping Trust: A model for co-creative community collaboration in an academic library” is a two-year project under the direction of Kirsten Delegard, director of Mapping Prejudice. The think tank will nurture conversations—with the voices of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) at the center—around local efforts to dismantle structural racism. Academics and researchers will learn from this work and use it to generate collaborations that reflect the priorities of community members and provide new resources for these efforts.

The Association of University Presses (AUPresses) has been awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to study the effect of open digital editions on the sales of print monographs. The Level I grant will support a study led by John Sherer, director of the University of North Carolina Press and chair of the AUPresses Open Access (OA) Committee, and Erich Van Rijn, associate director at the University of California Press, an AUPresses representative on the Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem Advisory Board and chair of the 2019-21 AUPresses OA Task Force. The project seeks to understand empirically whether the availability of OA editions of scholarly books has a quantifiable effect on the sales performance of print editions. While many university presses have pursued experiments with OA publishing, sustainable financing of high-quality, rigorous scholarly publishing operations is a significant concern. The study will look at both OA and traditionally published titles across multiple disciplines from many presses. Findings from the study will be shared publicly in support of scholarly publishers, peer institutions, and associations devoted to humanities scholarship.