I’m on the ALA Library Research Round Table. The LRRT offers the Ingenta Research Award every year, & the deadline for submitting proposals has just passed, on March 31. Yesterday I got an email from the LRRT Chair that included this:
I regret to advise you that we cannot award an Ingenta grant this year. Unfortunately, no one applied for the Ingenta grant and it is clear that we need to do a lot more advertising of the grant.
Lame lame lame! Not the LRRT; we publicized this award as much as we though necessary (though clearly we underestimated). I mean the library community at large. Come on, the Ingenta Award is $7,000! The proposal to apply for one needs to be 6 pages. Or less! That’s more than $1,000 per page. That’s a pretty damn good ROI; if it wasn’t a conflict of interest I’d apply for the damn thing myself.
The Ingenta Research Award is given annually by the Library Research Round Table of the American Library Association to support research projects about acquisition, use, and preservation of digital information.
Come on folks, a lot of you all out there in library-land have to publish for tenure. Or even if you don’t have tenure review, one of the purposes of the Master’s paper in SILS is to get students thinking about research in the contexts of libraries & other information service venues. Continue that line of thinking! Next year I want to see a bunch of SILS graduates applying for this thing! No excuses! Put it on your To Do list! I mean it!