Dear Mr. Lukash,

I received your name from Steve Shwartzman when I was at AIC a few weeks ago, as the best person at IMLS to contact with my grant proposal questions.

I am contacting you on behalf of the Wisconsin Heritage Online's (WHO) Future Directions Committee. We are hoping to apply to a federal agency (IMLS or NEH) to help fund what we see as two different phases of our statewide digitization initiative. I am attaching the first draft of our two phase implementation project with the hope that you can help us determine a number of things.

Does what we are proposing sound fundable from a program through IMLS? Are we re-inventing the wheel? and if so, who has already done all of this that we can copy more closely rather than trying to make this up as we are going along? Are you able to send us copies of successful grant proposals that have done similar work? Any help and information that you can provide to us would be gratefully accepted.

Is there any possibility that I can phone you tomorrow (at a time that you specify) to discuss our draft proposal so far, and to get your input on where we should head next with our statewide digitization project ideas?

I thank you very much in advance for your consideration of our request, Christine Del Re

Today (May 15) I have finally spoken to Dan Lukash from the IMLS office about the grant proposal created by this group, that I sent to him via e-mail last week. 

He made a number of comments which I include here:

1. he said that the most likely IMLS grant program would be the National Leadership grant category

2. the Tier 1 component cannot stand alone, but Tier 2 can stand alone as a funding element.  Or he also thought that Tier 1 & 2 could go together (although he also said that much of what was outlined in Tier 1 is certainly research and work that needs to be done anyway - whether we wanted it funded or not).

3.  Have we examined the Colorado statewide project and are we duplicating anything that they have already done? if so, our work would not be "original" and not fundable by IMLS since they funded the Colorado project .  He also said that the Colorado project is the only statewide intiative that IMLS has funded, so if we can locate a unique niche that would be important.

4.  I asked if it would strengthen our application to apply for a grant to do a "test group" for the state, and then apply all of what was learned to a broader statewide audience.  And he felt that that idea was fundable.

5.  Our job in writing the grant is to do the research to prove that whatever kind of project we apply for that it has either not been done before, or even if done before it has not yet been funded by IMLS.  This is the way in which we would establish that there would be a "national need" for the results of our project, and strengthen the application.

6.  I also asked him about this co-ordination of museum vs. library metadata which I know that the museum group is struggling with.  He said while as far as he knows many people have talked about it, but it has not been officially solved (even the Getty is working on this metadata conudrum) and certainly some original work on this in our statewide project would be worth funding.

I'm also asking this group at how closely other digitization iniatives were examined before WHO was set-up?    Have we examined all possible metadata merging intiatives?

that's what I can remember.  Chris