For my final project, I am working away writing a mock digitization grant for a South Carolina library. I am using the guidelines for the National Historical Publications and and Records Commission: Digitizing Historical Records grant. I choose this grant for a couple of reasons: 1) it dealt specifically with digitizing historical artifacts, 2) it allowed public libraries to receive funding, and 3) as a national granting institution, I wanted to gain experience following guidelines that I might need to follow when writing a real grant.
I am currently working on the Purposes and Goals of the Project section, which will probably be the longest section to write but might not be the most time consuming section of the entire grant. It is my goal to write about 500 words a day on the grant so it is fleshing out pretty quickly.
The mock grant is being written for the Richland County Public Library for the digitization of two made up collections that contain documents, journals, correspondence, and photographs focusing on Columbia, South Carolina during the Civil War. In the beginning, making up collections to include in the grant appeared easy. Once I began filling out basic information about what I wanted to be included in the collection, the process became much harder. I have to ask myself how many photographs could realistically have survived all the years about the Civil War, what sort of topics would be interesting to national scholars on the Civil War yet still might be reasonably donated to a public library, and what topics may have been documented by people at the time. Once I made some general discussions, I then had to come up with ways that this collection would be significant to scholarship on the Civil War in general.
