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SILS research funding increases 572 percent
Sept. 3, 2009—The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill reported a record-breaking rise in research funding from 2008 to 2009 totaling $716 million for fiscal year 2009. Contributing as one of the top performers, the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) saw a 572 percent jump in funding it received from primarily government agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS).
SILS received $7,714,912 in funding for the 2009 fiscal year compared to $1,147,239 in 2008. The increase is based on 24 grant awards representing many different areas of research.
“With the arrival of the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) group last fall, we witnessed a rise in grant awards almost immediately,” said Dr. Barbara B. Moran, interim dean. “In addition, our faculty received impressive awards for their research projects that contributed to the overall increase in our funding.”
Shortly after their arrival from the San Diego Supercomputer Center, members of the DICE group received $953,988 from the NSF for the “NARA Transcontinental Persistent Archive Prototype,” a project that conducts research on fundamental preservation principles to inform the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Electronic Records Archive. Principal Investigators, Drs. Reagan Moore, Richard Marciano and Arcot Rajasekar also received funding for projects, “SDCI Data Improvement: Data Grids for Community Driven Applications” ($1,338,314), “Distributed Custodial Preservation DCAPE” ($257,800), “e-Legacy: California’s Geospatial Records – Archival Appraisal, Accessioning and Preservation” ($137,697) and “The Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center Project at the University of California” ($43,252). The group's research totals over $2.7 million.
Dr. Helen Tibbo received $878,634 for the “DigCCurr II: Extending an International Digital Curation Curriculum to Doctoral Students and Practitioners,” and she received awards for “Archival Metrics and User Evaluations for Governmental Archives” ($37,004) and “Preserving Access to Our Digital Future: Building and International Digital Curation Curriculum” ($7,500).
A total of $449,317 was awarded to Dr. Cathy Blake for her project, “Towards Evidence Based Discovery.”
Dr. Jane Greenberg received grants for “Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering (HIVE)” ($334,699), and “A Digital Repository for Preservation and Sharing of Data Underlying Published Works in Evolutionary Biology” ($107,531).
In 2009, Dr. Gary Marchionini was awarded $295,716 for “III-Small: Result Space Support for Personal and Group Information Seeking Over Time” and $74,935 for “Collaborative Research: Curatorial Work and Learning in Virtual Environments.”
The project, “National Survey of the Information Seeking Behavior of Scientists” led by Dr. Brad Hemminger, received an award of $40,000.
Dr. Jeffrey Pomerantz received $43,299 for two workshops, “Workshop: Coordinating EU-US Digital Library Education” and “Workshop: i-Conference Doctoral Research Colloquium.”
“The remainder of this significant amount of funding was awarded to SILS for the training program with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Libraries,” said Moran. “This 35 year relationship provides library support services for the EPA in Research Triangle Park and offers terrific hands-on learning opportunities for our students and fresh ideas and service to the EPA Library.”
Not included in the 2009 fiscal year report are ongoing research projects (those begun in previous years) and collaborative research projects with universities and departments where faculty are co-principal investigators.
For example, Dr. Javed Mostafa is co-investigator with Dr. Lisa Lavange, principal investigator and director of the Collaborative Studies Coordinating Center at UNC at Chapel Hill for the three year, $2,480,772 project,“Multi-site Multiple Sclerosis Clinical Trials Management Registry.” Mostafa and Dr. Jane Greenberg are also co-investigators on the "SubPopulations and InteRmediate Outcome Measures in COPD Study (SPIROMICS) Genomics and Informatics Center," an $8 million project funded for seven years by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) "to coordinate a study looking at patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)."
Greenberg is also co-investigator on the three and a half year, $2,186,179 collaborative project, “A Digital Repository for Preservation and Sharing of Data Underlying Published Works in Evolutionary Biology.” Partners include, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, Duke University, North Carolina State University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (SILS Metadata Research Center and Biology), University of New Mexico and Yale University.