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About the Program Regional Grants

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About Regional Grants

Regional Grants offer up to $100,000 for up to two years of work.

MEAP Regional Grants should be used to create digital collections that include cultural heritage materials from three or more institutions, families, or archival repositories but relate to one theme, community or historical event. Projects should focus on digitization and metadata creation that enables findability for materials that are not physically held in one location. Projects should also include training and community engagement that ensure representative communities and stakeholders are included in the digitization and description process.

Regional Grants are held by one organizing Host Institution and must be managed by someone with previous experience completing a previous MEAP grant. Regional Grant Applications should indicate how previous MEAP experience will be applied to the new project.

Potential Regional Grant applicants must connect with the MEAP staff to discuss their application before submission.

Why Regional Grants?

Regional Grants provide an opportunity for previous MEAP grantees to activate the networks they have built through years of archival work, training, and community building.

Digitization provides an opportunity to link geographically distant collections - held in different institutions, in different cities, or different countries - without relocating any archival materials. Collections that are thematically linked can be digitized and described with a collaboratively agreed upon approach that enables researchers, community members, and other stakeholders to find and use collections together. Consistent metadata, in particular, will ensure that different collections are found together and understood to be related.

Regional Grants are also designed to help previous MEAP grantees share their knowledge and experience with other archival institutions, providing support for ongoing digitization work that ensures preservation of collections prioritized by local communities.

How do Regional Grants work?

Grant projects should result in the digitization of archival collections from at least three different institutions and apply consistent metadata practices to these materials, creating new opportunities for research by linking together disparate collections.

Regional Grants should have one Host Institution. The Host Institution must be a previous MEAP grant recipient. The project host will take responsibility for the application, manage all funds (if successful), and ensure that all digitized content is delivered according to MEAP requirements. This includes ensuring that digital files meet quality standards and that metadata is created according to the UCLA Digital Library Metadata formatting.

Regional Grant projects should be planned for no more than 24 months (2 years) and include digitization at (or from) 3 or more Archival Partners.

Grant activities should focus on digitization and documentation of collections held at multiple sites. Host Institutions will be responsible for ensuring that digitization is executed at a high quality. The Host Institution is also responsible for ensuring that metadata is created consistently across all archival collections. This should include collaboratively agreed upon metadata practices that align with MEAP requirements. Defining regional metadata standards that can be applied to different collections must be part of the Regional Grant project.

Funding should cover staff salaries across the project to ensure participation from all archival partners as well as equipment necessary to digitize at multiple locations or multiple media types. Funding should also cover training and community engagement as necessary to include all regional stakeholders in the process of securing permissions and documenting the collection. This may include training staff on digitization practices and metadata creation or workshops designed to define the controlled vocabularies and other metadata practices. This may also include public sessions designed to capture knowledge from local communities in descriptive metadata.

What activities can Regional Grant funds support?

NOTE: Funding will be distributed to one Host Institution who will be responsible for expenditures and accounting.

  • Salaries:

    • Salaries should be paid across multiple institutions to ensure that all project team members are compensated for their work.

    • Salaries should be equitable across the project team.

    • Salaries should focus on project team members working to digitize and create metadata.

    • MEAP does not cover administrative overhead, including salaries unrelated to the execution of the Regional Grant.

  • Equipment:

    • Any equipment purchases should augment or expand capacity in tandem with equipment from a previous MEAP grant. This might include adding audio digitization capacity to a site that purchased scanners and lighting in a previous grant. Or, it might include adding additional workstations to an existing digitization site to enable multiple collections to be processed simultaneously.

    • MEAP will not fund new digitization equipment for each individual archival partner.

  • Training and Workshops:

    • Training for all archival partners. While each individual archival organization would not receive new equipment, it would receive training related to conservation, preservation, digitization and/or metadata creation.

    • Any planned workshops should focus on engaging project partners to ensure open access permissions are in place, metadata is consistent and well defined, or multiple perspectives are part of the project planning process.

    • MEAP will not fund events or workshops that are purely promotional.

How will Regional Grants be evaluated?

Regional Grants must meet the same eligibility criteria as all other MEAP grant applications, including the requirement to publish all digital materials on the open access UCLA Digital Library.

Regional Grant applications must also address:

  • Why is a regional approach the right approach for this project?

  • How will collections be digitized (centrally or at multiple sites)?

  • How will metadata be created in a consistent manner? Consider collaborative approaches to defining metadata that best describes the collection from multiple perspectives.

  • Has the Host Institution established the necessary relationships to work across institutions?

  • How will archival partners work collaboratively to define the framework for metadata creation and digitization priorities?

  • Have all archival partners committed to being involved in the project?

    • All partners need to demonstrate they are committed to the project at the application phase by signing Archival Partner Forms. All Archival Partners will also have to secure permission to open access publication for digitization material in their collections. These permissions do not all need to be in place at the application phase. However, we recommend applying with a majority of Copyright Agreement Forms signed. As a reminder, MEAP cannot fund projects that cannot ensure open access publishing.