University of Houston Libraries has awarded funds to innovative project teams through its Microgrant Program.

Now in its 10th year, the Microgrant Program fosters new ideas in support of the Libraries’ Strategic Plan and the University’s goals.

Library staff submitted proposals for new services and programs which would benefit teaching, learning and research objectives of the UH community, and will collaborate in cross-departmental teams to implement their ideas.

The UH Libraries Microgrant Program winners for 2018-2019 are:

Project title: Love Data @ UH
Wenli Gao (chair), Andrea Malone, Taylor Davis-Van Atta, Alex Simons

Formerly known as Love Your Data Week, the purpose of the Love Data @ UH event is to raise awareness and build an engaged community around topics related to research data management, sharing, preservation, reuse, and library-based research data services. The project team will invite campus units that provide data-related services to talk about their services, and also invite faculty/students who use data in their research and teaching to showcase their projects.

Project title: Inaugural UH Digital Scholarship Winter Institute
Claude Willan (chair), Taylor Davis-Van Atta, Elizabeth Stravoski

Hosted in the Digital Research Commons and facilitated by the Digital Research Services department, the inaugural Digital Humanities Winter Institute at UH will be a five-day intensive boot camp for UH faculty and students interested in planning and executing their digital scholarship research projects. A campus-wide call for applicants will be circulated in the early part of the fall 2018 semester. Six UH researchers will make selections using criteria adapted from current acceptance criteria for DRC project proposals, with the goal of developing a cohort of projects around a common theme or set of approaches.

The Institute will run from Monday, January 7, through Friday, January 11, 2019. During the week, participants will have opportunities for individual consultations with Claude Willan, Taylor Davis-Van Atta, Wenli Gao, and other specialists, as well as access to software and equipment. Each researcher will be given a flash drive with an FAQ about project building and a zip archive containing the required components to install several key free software tools to help them get started.

Thanks to the members of the Microgrant Committee: Alex Simons (chair), Jay Harkin, Jamie Duke, and Daniel Pshock.