Humanities Open Book Program

Post Date

March 22nd 2016

Application Due Date

September 13th 2016

Funding Opportunity Number

20160913-HZ

CFDA Number(s)

45.169

Funding Instrument Type(s)

Grant

Funding Activity Categories

Humanities

Eligibility Categories

State Governments
County Governments
City or Township Governments
Special District Governments
Public and State Controlled Institutions of Higher Education
Federally Recognized Native American Tribal Governments
Non-Profits With 501 (c) (3) Status With The IRS (Except Higher Education Institutions)
Non-Profits Without 501 (c) (3) Status With The IRS (Except Higher Education Institutions)
Private Institutions of Higher Education

Funding

• Award Range:

  $50000 - $100000

Grant Description

The Humanities Open Book Program is designed to make outstanding out-of-print humanities books available to a wide audience. By taking advantage of low-cost ЯebookН technology, the program will allow teachers, students, scholars, and the public to read humanities books that have long been out of print. Humanities Open Book is jointly sponsored by NEH and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Traditionally, printed books have been the primary medium for expressing, communicating, and debating humanistic ideas. However, the vast majority of humanities books sell a small number of copies and then quickly go out of print. Most scholarly books printed since 1923 are not in the public domain and are not easily available to the general public. As a result, there is a huge, mostly untapped resource of remarkable scholarship going back decades that is largely unused by todayмs scholars, teachers, students, and members of the public, many of whom turn first to the Internet when looking for information. Modern ebook technology can make these books far more accessible than they are today. NEH and Mellon are soliciting proposals from academic presses, scholarly societies, museums, and other institutions that publish books in the humanities to participate in the Humanities Open Book Program. Applicants will provide a list of previously published humanities books along with brief descriptions of the books and their intellectual significance. Depending on the length and topics of the books, the number to be digitized may vary. However, NEH and Mellon anticipate that applicants may propose to digitize a total that ranges from less than fifty to more than one hundred books. Awards will be given to digitize these books and make them available as Creative Commons-licensed ЯebooksН that can be read by the public at no charge on computers, mobile devices, and ebook readers. The final ebook files must be in EPUB version 3.0.1 (or later) format, to ensure that the text is fully searchable and reflowable and that fonts are resizable on any e-reading device.

Contact Information

• Agency

  National Endowment for the Humanities

• Office:

  None

• Agency Contact:

  If you have questions about the program, contact the ODH staff at odh@neh.gov. Applicants wishing to speak to a staff member by telephone should provide in an e-mail message a telephone number and a preferred time to call.
  
  odh@neh.gov
  

• Agency Mailing Address:

  odh@neh.gov

• Agency Email Address:

  odh@neh.gov

• More Information:

  http://www.neh.gov/grants/odh/humanities-open-book-program