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MLA is calling for expressions of interest from institutions in England interested in contributing digital content relating to a sense of place to the developing Discovery Service of the People's Network in England. Place is a popular and compelling topic of interest and the People's Network Discovery Service aims to provide integrated access to such materials as part of the wide range of content and services it interacts with. The Discovery Service will provide intelligent search mechanisms to enable users to find resources of immediate relevance to their needs from disparate sources. Taking part presents many benefits for institutions because integrated access maximises use of digital materials of immediate relevance to users, which may not otherwise be readily available. This approach also optimises the return on investment made by everyone who produces digital content and enhances services with added value benefits for data suppliers. Many projects will already be able to enable access to their resources, but in addition, small grants of between £2,000 and £4,000, will be made available to support the necessary work to enable relevant projects to make data available to the Discovery Service of the People's Network in England. It is anticipated that 20 to 30 grants will be available. For this Sense of Place content contribution call, MLA is primarily seeking to provide integrated item-level access to publicly available online digital collections which contain structured metadata records and related digital objects, such as documents, images, sound and video. Taking part MLA recognises that there are many institutions in England who may wish to take part. Initial priority for inclusion and funding within the Discovery Service will be given to the following: * NOF Digitise projects (to work at a greater level of granularity than that of the EnrichUK database, i.e. item-level) * public library place-based digitisation projects * public-library-based collection-description initiatives for appropriate physical and/or digital materials * MLA-funded Designation and Renaissance projects The closing date for expressions of interest is Tuesday 7th December 2004. Grants will be awarded during January 2005. Further information and the application form are available on the MLA website at http://www.mla.gov.uk/information/funding/sop.asp For further information contact Phill Purdy, People's Network Service Development Officer, at [log in to unmask] or 020 7273 8284 Emma Halsall Archive Policy Adviser Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) 16 Queen Anne's Gate, London, SW1H 9AA Tel: (020) 7273 1421 www.mla.gov.uk ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________