DPLA to give subawards to support creation of new By the Quill of Her Pen ebook
Digital Public Library of America is pleased to announce that we are beginning production on the publication of a new ebook, tentatively titled By the Quill of Her Pen: Black Suffragists in Their Own Words. This new DPLA-published ebook will be a collection of 20-30 letters, diary entries, and accompanying photographs and biographical information that help bring to life the stories of Black women suffragists through their own writings.
If your institution holds materials you think would be a good fit for this new ebook, we’d love to hear from you. Materials will need to be able to be rights-cleared. Selected materials would also be presented with accompanying contextualization, so items with a backstory that has already been researched are ideal.
The goal of DPLA publishing projects is to expand access to information for all. Therefore books that DPLA publishes are open access, made available either in the public domain or with a Creative Commons license. The book will be available in the Open Bookshelf, DPLA’s collection of free ebooks designed to integrate easily into the collections of libraries using the Library Simplified platform and SimplyE app and also freely available for free, instant download at freebooks.dp.la, and to other libraries and the public. DPLA has been working with our partner Digital Divide Data to create high quality accessible ebooks in EPUB form, beginning with our award-winning version of the Mueller Report, our compendium of Impeachment Papers, and books from St. Mary’s County Library including In Relentless Pursuit of an Education.
To have individual letters considered for inclusion in this project, please add them to this Google Sheet. We are also using this sheet to collect information about upcoming collections that should be tagged for the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection (see tab Collections of Interest TBD and Tagged for BWS).
Subawards of between $3,000 and $5,000 will be awarded to contributing institutions so that they can digitize relevant materials. We recognize that while adapting to the pandemic, many libraries are monitoring collections remotely and digitizing “on-demand.” Support is available for item-level processing; digitization of key collections at the folder or box level; metadata creation and remediation; and copyright clearance/assigning edm:rights. Subawards will be awarded on a rolling basis through 2021, the work must be completed by December 2021, and a brief narrative and financial report will be required at the end of the project. If multiple institutions share responsibility, one institution needs to be chosen to receive and manage the funds. Indirect costs may not be covered by these funds.
In order to receive this funding, the contributing institution must provide the following information:
● Name and contact information of point of contact for the project
● Name and contact information of person with fiscal responsibility for the project
● Address for receipt of funds
● Brief description of the collections
● A budget of how the funds will be spent based on the plan of work
● What is the plan of work? Include the work to be done, who will be doing the work, and project goals and deliverables
● What hub will the contributing institution be working with such that metadata is available through the DPLA? If the contributor is not connected to a hub what is the alternative pathway for ingestion or exhibition?
Cultural heritage organizations outside of the DPLA network are encouraged to participate in the By the Quill of Her Pen ebook project. Organizations that do not currently feed into a DPLA hub may agree to contribute materials under the following terms:
● Provide TIFF or JPEG format for images at least 1024 pixels in the largest dimension via file-sharing site (Google Drive or Dropbox)
● Will assign a Rights Statement or creative commons license to individual images and relevant metadata fields.
● Share content by acknowledging and endorsing DPLA’s use and distribution of the content and making reasonable efforts when needed to facilitate the transfer of the files, metadata, and images, and to add newly available content when available.
● Acknowledge that content is open, searchable and indexed in the dp.la portal and that DPLA will have no control over or responsibility for what users may do with the content, and is released from any liability.
Narrative information should be no more than 1 page. Proposals must be submitted to Shanee´ Murrain (shanee@dp.la).