Contact: Kathlin Smith
202-939-4754
Washington, DC, June 28, 2017—The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded CLIR $981,000 to augment and extend its efforts to establish sound data management in Latin American and Caribbean Studies by building a professional cohort of knowledgeable specialists working in the field. Complementing the first round of fellowships in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, announced this week, the new grant will fund a second cohort of five fellows for two years at U.S. or Canadian institutions with strong programs in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, starting in July 2018.
Latin American and Caribbean Studies incorporate modes of inquiry from numerous fields within the humanities and social sciences, including history, sociology, art, archaeology, literature, political science, geography, gender studies, and economics. The fellowships are designed to support international partnerships in the service of cross-disciplinary humanities research and in building greater capacity for digitizing original materials, for sharing related digital data, and for developing humanities computing.
”These new scholar-practitioners, and the international connections among host and partnering institutions that our program promises to strengthen, will help develop sustainable approaches to research data management that transcend institutional, national, and disciplinary boundaries,” said Principal Investigator and CLIR Senior Program Officer Alice Bishop
The CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellowships in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies are integrated into CLIR’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, which trains and establishes cohorts of professionals with subject expertise who possess a more expansive understanding of digital information and its integral role in research and teaching.
“This grant makes possible a second cohort of experts in data curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, a vibrant discipline of significant sweep and import,” said CLIR President Charles Henry. “Combined with the experience, acumen, and insight of the first team of postdoctoral fellows, these technically astute scholars will further enrich and sustain best practices to preserve, migrate, and repurpose data essential to the vitality of this academic field.”
CLIR launched its Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in 2004. To date, it has educated and placed 165 fellows at 72 host institutions across the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong.
CLIR will post fellowship openings in October 2017 at https://www.clir.org/fellowships/postdoc. The candidate application deadline will be December 29, 2017, and awards will be announced in June 2018.
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is an independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning.
The Digital Library Federation, founded in 1995, is a robust and diverse community of practice, advancing research, learning, and the public good through digital library technologies. DLF connects its parent organization, CLIR, to an active practitioner network, consisting of 162 member institutions, including colleges, universities, public libraries, museums, labs, agencies, and consortia.