The JISC and the US’s National Endowment for the Humanities are pleased to announce they will be funding a second round of Transatlantic Digitisation grants.

This pre-announcement is being made so that potential applicants can start developing the necessary partnerships. The call will be issued in mid December, with a closing date of the beginning of March 2009. Funding is available for projects starting from August 2009 with a project length of 18 months.  All projects must be completed by March 2011.

As with before, applications will be sought in the following areas

* New digitisation projects and pilot projects
* Addition of important material to existing digitisation projects
* Development of infrastructure to support US-English digitisation work

The maximum each project will be able to apply for is £200k / $300k, to be split between the projects partners.

JISC and NEH have also been in discussion with other international funding bodies about developing a separate competition to encourage international teams to explore the possibilities of large scale text and data mining overlarge corpora of digitised content. A call for this will be released in the New Year.