Mike Crandall awarded $250K National Leadership Grant

The Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded a National Leadership Grants for Libraries (NLG) to the iSchool. The $250,000 award will advance library and archives practice by addressing challenges in the field and by testing and evaluating innovations.

Senior Lecturer Mike Crandall and team will develop an online Linked Data Exploratorium to provide students, professionals, and instructors in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) field with structured access to learning resources about Linked Data technology. Learning resources elucidating specific professional competencies will be described and indexed according to skills and knowledge, and will be clustered for discovery.

“Libraries are changing to meet the evolving learning, social, and informational landscapes of their communities. These grants reflect truly creative thinking by library and archive professionals—along with their university, professional association, and local government partners—that will ensure the continued role of libraries as community anchors for generations to come,” said IMLS Director Susan H. Hildreth.

NLG support projects that address challenges faced by the library and archive fields. Successful projects have the potential to improve library services nationwide. Grantees generate results such as new tools, research findings, models, services, practices, or alliances that can be widely used, adapted, scaled, or replicated to extend the benefits of federal investment.

The projects were selected from 212 applications, requesting more than $14.6 million and matched with $7,154,135 in non-federal funds.

Read the announcement.