Digital Projects – Grant Guidelines 2023
- The Association of Librarians and Archivists at Baptist Institutions (ALABI) sponsors a program whereby funds are made available for partial support in digitizing Baptist historical resources. The program provides a grant of $500.
- Applications are open to institutional libraries and archives affiliated with Baptist colleges, universities, seminaries, state Baptist historical collections, and Baptist agencies and conventions from the pan-Baptist family.
- Applicants for the grant must use the ALABI application form. Grants are received all year long with a May 12 deadline. Applications are reviewed by an ALABI committee and the successful applicant notified by May 19.
- The digital project must be a Baptist related resource such as a periodical, book(s), pamphlets, archival collection(s), or other Baptist resource. Projects funded through the grants must be made freely available without access restrictions to the general public. The project should involve a resource not already available on the web.
- The applicant should state clearly the scope and content of the digitization project. Preference in awarding grants may be given to those projects with a large and diverse research appeal.
- Grant recipients must submit a final report to ALABI at the completion of the project.
- The digital resource should be accessible on the web in a timely fashion after the completion.
- Acknowledgement of the financial support of ALABI for the digital project should be included on the website.
- Standards adopted by ALABI for digital projects are found below:
Baptist Digital Projects
The Association of Librarians and Archivists at Baptist Institutions (ALABI) is committed to assist in making available, on the World Wide Web, certain Baptist resources to the general public. Projects of the Association will not include Baptist items already available through Google Books or the Internet Archive. The Association will focus on materials that do not require prohibitive permissions and materials of interest to a wide range of users. Resources selected for digital projects will include materials related to both Southern Baptists and the larger Baptist family. These resources include Baptist reference books, serials, pamphlets, annuals, sermon collections, historic documents in particular subject areas, photographic images, and archival collections. Preference will be given to complete and full runs of serials and collections.
Digital projects will focus on materials in a textual and still image format. Audio and video recordings and motion picture films will not be considered as digital projects at this time.
The Library of Congress and other national and regional organizations have developed comprehensive guidelines and standards for digital scanning and web presentation. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/about/techStandards.pdf The digital projects endorsed by ALABI will follow these standards as closely as possible and practical. The general format for most textual projects will be PDF (Portable Document Format) scanned at a minimum of 300 dpi. Still images (photographs and slides) will be scanned in an archival TIFF (Tagged Image File) and use JPEG format for presenting images on the web. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Google Search enhancements will be applied to all textual items when appropriate. All digitally produced items and materials will include adequate and basic metadata. Serial publications will include one PDF file per issue.