AMIA Presentation

I am the assistant moving image and sound archivist, as Molly mentioned, and just as additional background, before finishing my library science degree and getting a job in libraries, I did work for several nonprofits in development and fundraising, so even before this project started, I had some experience working with grants.

I was really sparked to find and apply for this grant because we have no budget for outside digitization. Despite the fact that we can’t work with all formats in-house and our in-house digitization equipment is really unsatisfactory, our library is really strapped for funding right now. Our budget has not been increased either by the university or the state legislature, and our resources, sadly, are just not being allotted to Special Collections projects.

The way we approached grant writing, which our grants and contracts manager at the time suggested, was to first write a series of white papers about potential projects. These white papers had all the basic information we needed to look for grant funders; they had brief notes on historical significance of the collection, inventories of the number of items and formats, and the level of processing already done on the collection. All of this gives you an idea of how much money you need to ask for. That said, always overestimate your budget.

Once we had six or seven of these white papers written, we met with our grants and contracts manager and reviewed them. We identified one to three projects that were really fund-able. What our grants manager was looking for and what he identified as fund-able projects were the projects with a subject focus that had national significance, that really were interesting, even to those not in the moving image archives business, and that had more of a discrete run. For example, one of the white papers that didn’t really move forward was for our ski home movies collections. Those movies are housed within a bunch of disparate collections, whereas this project was for a single run of Umatic tapes that comprise a newsmagazine run within a larger news collection.

The next step in the process is selecting a funder. A lot of this has to do with how much grantwriting experience you have, as well as how much money you need. We didn’t need more than 20, 000 so we worked on applying for an LSTA grant administered by the Utah State Library.Other potential local funders you could look at if you are just starting out with grantwriting are local historical societies, local arts and humanities councils, or state agencies.

The next step for us was to work within our organization to obtain approval for the grant request. The way it works at Marriott, we have one dean of the library. We have four associate deans, who are part of the executive council that approves projects. We submitted a one page summary to be approved by the Executive Council and hit a serious roadblock.

The Interim director of IT brought up the issue of how much data this project would produce. And he ended up giving a presentation on archival digital storage costs. This is a slide from his presentation, and if you can see what it says in the back, he estimated that our project would produce about 10 TBs of data. And he estimated that those 10 TBs would cost almost $10,000 per year to preserve digitally with tape back ups. So that means that the cost to the library over the next ten years for these tapes is nearly a hundred thousand dollars, which is a lot of money in libraryland.

Before I discuss how we approached working through this challenge, I want to point out a number of factors that contributed to it. The first factor is lack of communication. One of the challenges of working in Special Collections is that you work behind closed and locked doors. Doors that other staff can’t get behind. Now, after this slide was presented to the Executive Council, one of the Associate Deans approached us and told us to stop digitizing everything. And clearly, to me, this indicated that most of the ADs had really no idea what we did in the AV Archives. We digitize items on a daily basis. But there is also a digital operations department in the library that digitizes far more on a daily basis than we probably do on a weekly or monthly basis. The digital operations department produces about a TB of data every two weeks. I think there was a communication issue in terms of scale when the Associate Deans looked at the grant. Some folks who don’t work with large file sizes, it’s hard to grasp how much data is a TB. And without having the information on how much data our Digital Operations department produces weekly, the magnitude of 10 TB seems like an incredibly vast amount of data.

At the time, also, there were a lot of interim positions at our library. We had an interim dean. We also had an interim associate dean over IT. Now, I’m not just pinning this on those folks for not understanding what we do, because clearly we have not communicated what we do. It’s a problem on both sides of the fence that our archives is so misunderstood. One of things that we did after the issue of data storage costs blew up at our library that promoted better understanding of our archives was to give a number of presentations about the content and data storage needs of our department. Some of these were to associate deans, and some were to executive council. We also started working more hand in hand with our digital preservation department to figure out what exactly would be possible given the concern expressed by Executive Council about the data storage costs.

During this process, we got a lot of conflicting messages. On one hand, the executive council was saying stop everything. On the other hand, the head of Digital Initiatives was telling us that everything was fine, we didn’t need to stress about data storage costs.

We eventually came to a compromise about the situation. We were able to work with our grants manager to speak with the grant administrators and get the okay to request digital preservation funds for the data produced by the grant. The trick is with requesting grant funding is that most grants will not allow you to spend money past the life of the grant. So the ongoing costs of digital preservation are just not funded by digitization grants. We were able to ask for money for digital preservation for the life of the grant, which was one year, This appeased the Executive Council somewhat and the grant was allowed through. The costs of digital preservation are still

a big question mark at our library. We haven’t resolved how to fund it by any means, but ultimately, I think we are better off, as a library, for having gone through this, because at least now we are thinking about it.

So here is our final grant ask. We requested $4988 for salaries. That included a percentage of my salary for overseeing the project, and the salary for a part time intern to do the metadata work for the collection. We also asked for $4956 for digitizing services. We asked for $1100 to create a website for the digital collection, and have a small launch party. And finally, we asked for $3664 in data storage costs. And Molly will now talk about what exactly we received in grant funding for this project.