Grants and Acquisitions

David Free

Acquisitions

The Stony Brook University Libraries have received a donation of historic documents that outline the battle to stop the construction of a highway on Fire Island while fighting successfully to create the Fire Island National Seashore (FINS), New York. The documents reveal the efforts of the Citizen’s Committee for a Fire Island National Seashore, the grassroots community campaign that prevented Robert Moses’s plan in the 1960s. The collection was gifted by the Barbash family. Maurice Barbash, the father of Cathy, Susan, and Shepard Barbash, and their uncle Irving Like led the committee’s efforts and organized it.

The collection has historical importance in the establishment of the Fire Island National Seashore (FINS) and includes committee meeting minutes, press releases, and correspondence with New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Stuart Udall, secretary of the interior. The timing of the donation coincides with the upcoming 60th anniversary of the legislation that created FINS as a unit of the National Park Service (September 11, 1964). These items will become part of the University Libraries’ Special Collections, which oversees and curates the university’s rare books, maps, archival materials, manuscripts, and historical maps. Details about the collection will be accessible via a dedicated webpage, and the papers will be digitized and made freely available online.

Grants

The Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration and Innovation (PALCI) and the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI) have been awarded a $248,600 grant for Sustaining the Hyku Repository Platform: Addressing Hyku’s Unique Community Coordination and Collaboration Challenges. The two-year grant is one of 85 given by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to support libraries and archival services across the country and was made through the National Leadership Grants for Libraries and the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program. It aims to strengthen collaborative efforts to ensure Hyku remains a viable, efficient, and sustainable solution for managing and preserving digital content across a diverse range of institutions.

PALNI additionally received a $149,893 grant to develop an innovative open-source reading list system, Personalized Easily Accessible Reading Lists (PEARL) through the National Leadership Grants for Libraries and the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program. This two-year planning grant will enable PALNI to complete the development of a prototype for this new system, which will influence the way libraries, faculty, and students interact with educational resources.

The University Libraries at Virginia Tech and the University of California, Riverside, have received a $115,398 Institute of Museum and Library Services grant to create a generative artificial intelligence incubator program (GenAI) to increase the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in the library profession and academic libraries. The incubator program aims to train librarians in generative artificial intelligence skills to improve library services. Participants of the incubator program will learn the fundamentals of GenAI, advance their knowledge through guided demonstration and real-world examples, and then create a GenAI application for a library use case in either GenAI literacy, collection, preservation, or research. At the end of the program, participants will possess a deep understanding, practical expertise, and the ability to demonstrate the impact of AI in the global library community.

The Library of Congress Professional Learning and Outreach Initiatives Office, under the Center for Learning Literacy and Engagement, has awarded Teaching with Primary Sources grants to 23 first-time and 19 continuing grantee organizations located in the US and Puerto Rico. The grants awarded provide one year of funding, with the possibility of two additional one-year grants, contingent upon successful delivery of Teaching with Primary Sources educational projects based on Library of Congress digitized materials. With these competitive awards, the grantees become members of the Teaching with Primary Sources Consortium, a group of institutional partners that assist the library in strengthening efforts to connect with all learners. They will join a cohort of 19 organizations that competed to receive a fourth year of funding to continue the Teaching with Primary Sources projects they began in 2022. Learn more at https://www.loc.gov/programs/teachers/about-this-program/teaching-with-primary-sources-partner-program/.