Deadlines: TBD- Many opportunities have been postponed or cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic

For: Faculty and Staff

Application Form

If you are planning conference, research, or other work-related travel this year and would be interested in adding to that trip a bit of exploratory work about how DH/DLA work happens in other places, this is the grant for you.

$200 of FTR or staff professional development money will be offered to faculty or staff members willing to add to an existing trip, to talk to DLA/DH team members at another institution. These funds must be applied to travel expenses for this trip. This is part of the Site Visits initiative, which is designed to help Macalester DLA identify models of excellence that we might emulate as we seek to establish sustainable DLA efforts on campus. We hope that faculty or staff interested in learning more about what “DLA projects” can mean will help us expand the range of places we can visit and learn from. You are welcome to combine this reconnaissance work with questions applicable to your own research/project interests.

Your Obligations

1. Be interested, curious, and willing to commit a little time; no particular DH/DLA prior experience necessary.
2. Commit to two or three conversations with people–program or center directors, technology staff, librarians, post-docs, or other personnel who are responsible for collaborating on or supporting DLA projects on campus–at another institution.
3. Take notes and send them to the Mac DLA team.
4. Have a brief meeting with the Macalester DLA director, post-doc, and other members of the DLA Team upon your return to discuss the most important of your findings, from your perspective.

The DLA Team at Macalester will broker the necessary introductions and schedule the meetings around your conference/other obligations on this trip, as well as provide you a list of detailed questions and topics of interest, from which you are free to select, depending on how your conversations go and the structures of the institution you are visiting. These might include: 

• How are digital initiatives supported at the institution? For whom?
• What do they think has been most successful thus far about their programming? 
• What is the institution struggling with? 
• What is the most inspiring thing about this site, its structure, programming, or initiatives, that we ought to adopt as we develop our own sustainable structures?

You are of course also welcome to ask any questions that might be of personal interest to your own research, projects, or curiosity.

Selection Criteria: Recipients will be chosen in part on the basis of how the group as a whole will enable coverage of different types of projects, institutions, or centers. In the event of more interest than we can support, final selections may also be made with an eye towards including coverage across site visits from faculty in multiple divisions. Some priority may be given to those who are traveling to places with programs that are robust, sustainable without grant funding, and of a scale that they might provide interesting models for Macalester. This does not rule out programs at R1 schools or heavily-endowed centers, however, as there may be aspects of their programming or structure that are scalable to Macalester’s needs. (Please note: only one Exploratory Grant may be awarded per faculty member.) If you are unsure whether the place you are going might be an interesting candidate for this kind of visit, please feel free to reach out to Andrea Kaston Tange (akastont@macalester.edu), DLA Director, for a conversation.