Calling all grantwriters! This page contains some language that you may find useful as you apply for digitization grants, if you plan to contribute it to Calisphere. Feel free to cut-and-paste and augment this language as fits your proposal and your project.

We've tried to include information that is commonly asked for on grants. If we have not here addressed something that you need for your proposal, feel free to contact us and we can provide additional information.

Sharing content with Calisphere

The digital objects generated [by this grant project] will be shared and disseminated broadly through California Digital Library's Calisphere platform. Calisphere aggregates collections from libraries, archives, and museums across the state of California by way of a metadata harvest from the host systems into centralized index. The collections are displayed on the Calisphere website (https://calisphere.org), which is a free, open portal to over two million digital primary sources from all ten UC campuses and public and private institutions across the state. Calisphere is used by researchers of all levels in a range of disciplines, including K-12 students, teachers, academics, genealogists, artists, and more. Dramatically redesigned in late 2015, Calisphere has been lauded for its best-of-breed user interface, and is on the American Library Associations "best historical materials" list. Each collection on Calisphere has its own landing page on the site, which ensures researchers see all of the digital objects associated with a given collection.

[If you know of related collections on Calisphere that would complement yours, you could additionally weave into this section some information about how your collections will gain even more value by this association/aggregation.]

Digital Public Library of America

All of the objects shared with Calisphere are also shared with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA; http://dp.la). DPLA is a public portal to millions of digital items aggregated from institutions across the country. Sharing metadata with DPLA will further increase the visibility and use of the items digitized as part of [this grant project]. [If you know of related collections on DPLA that would complement yours, you could additionally weave into this section some information about how your collections will gain even more value by this association/aggregation.]

The DPLA platform has an application programming interface (APIs), which is freely available for institutions and individuals to use to "remix" collections and further share and present them in myriad new ways. [If you know of related collections that would complement yours, you could talk about how those collections could be aggregated and presented through a portal, digital humanities projects, etc.]

Metadata specs

Metadata stored within the Calisphere platform is standardized based on the Dublin Core element and the DPLA Metadata Application Profile. This ensures the interoperability and display of data in Calisphere, as well as within DPLA. The records will be broadly available through a Creative Commons public domain dedication (CC0) and will comply with DPLA’s Policy Statement on Metadata [PDF].

UC Shared DAMS (management of assets)

If you are a UC institution and you are planning on building and storing your digital collections in Nuxeo (and/or preserving them in Merritt), please click here for some additional grants language about these services.