Engadget: Reddit launches $1 million fund to support user-driven projects. “You’ll finally have a chance to host that r/legaladvice happy hour, or take your friends from r/animalpics to the zoo. Reddit is investing $1 million in its Community Funds program, which aims to help users get their projects and ideas off the ground. “
Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation: IPLC Supports arXiv. “All 13 Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (IPLC) partner institutions* will provide financial support for arXiv in 2022. arXiv is an open-access archive for nearly 2 million scholarly articles in a variety of fields such as physics, mathematics, economics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, as well as electrical engineering and systems science.”
University of Southern Mississippi: Stuart Edits Book on Economics Across Libraries, Archives, and Museums. “The book covers the five most important areas in the development and sustainability of collaborative LAM projects: the digital environment; collaborative models; education; funding issues; and alternate sources of funding. Responding directly to the issue of a lack of adequate funding for maintaining and providing access to cultural heritage resources globally, the book argues that cultural heritage institutions must seek creative methods for funding and collaboration at all levels to achieve shared goals.”
Commonwealth of Nations: New funding database for ocean action. “The Commonwealth Secretariat has launched an online database to help member countries be aware of and access more than US$170 million of international funding available for ocean-related projects. Accompanying this new web tool is a handbook containing valuable guidance on how to navigate the database, as well as match and pitch projects to the most suitable funders.”
ArtsHub: $5.5 Million for National Film and Sound Archive. This is Australia. “Perenially starved, fighting a tsunami of content, forced to choose between acquisition and accessibility, the NFSA is always starved for cash. Today Minister Fletcher made a funding announcement as part of a flurry of activity at the cultural end of his portfolio. The NFSA will receive $5.5 million over the next four years. Sounds like junk money but it is claimed to be enough to ‘achieve the digitisation of all audio and video magnetic tape by 2025’.”
BetaNews: Web accessibility platform accessiBe secures $12 million to make the entire web accessible. “Web accessibility platform accessiBe announced that it has secured funding from global investment firm K1 Investment Management, LLC. The $12 million capital will be used to help the company grow its market in North America and improve its services for its customers and partners.”
Inside Higher Ed: Protecting Art in College Collections. “University-owned museums are feeling the effects of the coronavirus pandemic in different ways. Like most other units of their universities, they’re closed to the public, having moved their programming online. And like most everyone else in academe, museum staff are planning for lots of different reopening scenarios and waiting to see what comes next.”
Neowin: Google announces more than $800 million in financial grants amid COVID-19 fallout. “Google announced today more than $800 million in total funding to help businesses, health organizations, and governments weather through the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. CEO Sundar Pichai says the new financial grants will aid in providing small and medium-sized businesses with capital as well as offer free ad slots to health authorities in order to help disseminate information on the virus.”
The Mandarin: Anne Twomey: National Archives ‘completely dysfunctional’ for serious scholarship. “Constitutional law professor Anne Twomey thinks the National Archives is nearly useless for serious academic and historical research, partly because it is ‘starved of funding’ and takes too long to decide whether to open old government records.”
Nature: Crowdfunding research flips science’s traditional reward model. “No papers? No problem. Scientists who have historically been at a disadvantage when pursuing traditional funding sources — for example, those who lack extensive experience or who do not demonstrate a good publication record — are now the most successful at sourcing money from the public.”
BBC: BBC urged to increase National Broadcast Archive for Wales funding. “The BBC should commit more to the running costs of a new National Broadcast Archive for Wales, the deputy minister for culture has said. Lord Dafydd Elis-Thomas has refused to commit funding for the project at the National Library of Wales because of fears over its long-term sustainability. He told the assembly’s culture committee the BBC needed to increase its financial support for the plans in order to proceed.”
Search Engine Journal: DuckDuckGo Receives $10M Financing to Expand Global Impact. “DuckDuckGo is receiving a US$10-million investment through a partnership with OMERS to help the search engine continue expanding its privacy protection worldwide. OMERS, which stands for Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, is one of Canada’s largest pension funds.”
YouTube Blog: Greater transparency for users around news broadcasters. “A big goal for us in 2018 is to provide greater transparency across the board to our community of creators, advertisers, and viewers. In one small step towards that commitment, today we will start rolling out notices below videos uploaded by news broadcasters that receive some level of government or public funding. Our goal is to equip users with additional information to help them better understand the sources of news content that they choose to watch on YouTube.”
Scientific American: Culture Shock: Precious Microbe Collections Languish in Threatened Bio-Libraries. “Freeze-dried and locked away in liquid nitrogen–filled vaults around the world are hundreds of thousands of microbial cultures. In the U.S. these living libraries include 91,000 bacterial and fungal strains in Peoria, Ill., as well as 13,000 fungal strains in Ithaca, N.Y., and 7,500 wild yeasts at the University of California, Davis. Researchers have used strains from such publicly accessible culture collections to develop penicillin as well as the CRISPR gene-editing systems and the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) DNA-amplifying technique. But as government priorities apparently change, and as the federal money that historically created and preserved many of these biological resource repositories in the U.S. dries up, their infrastructure is at risk of deteriorating. “
