NCC Historical Projects: Grants and Fellowships

As a service to the field of Japanese Studies the NCC offers this list of grants and fellowships related to the Japanese Library and Information field and to scholarly research using major Japanese and East Asian Collections in North America and elsewhere. The links contained on this page will continue to grow as new sources of funding open up or become known to us. This page focuses particularly on funding related to the NCC's major areas of operation; collection development, professional training for librarians, user training for faculty and students, and research grants facilitating greater access to East Asian Collections. The NCC welcomes suggested additions to this page.

Funding for Japanese Collection Development

With the support of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and the Japan Publications Trading Company, Ltd., the NCC's Multi-Volume Sets Project funds grants for the purchase of rare and expensive sets of Japanese language materials by libraries in the U.S. that can demonstrate a local need for the materials, will agree to make the sets freely available locally and through interlibrary loan, and will promptly purchase and catalog the materials once an MVS grant has been received. Individual faculty members at institutions with little or no Japanese language collection may also apply for MVS Grants providing they can document their institution's willingness to abide by the policies governing the MVS Project. For full information about MVS Grant Application Guidelines and Schedule, and for a complete list of sets purchased and proposed to the MVS project in the past, please visit the MVS page on this site at http://www.nccjapan.org/mvs.html.

Opportunities for Training of Librarians and Users of Japanese Materials

Training is a central part of the NCC's mission. In the past the NCC has offered intensive training seminars for junior Japanese Studies librarians and for other librarians who serve Japanese Studies users, and coordinated small workshops for users. Other such programs will be offered by the NCC in the future as the demand requires. For background information about the 2002 Junior Japanese Librarians Professional Training Seminar (the JLTS) please see the NCC's digital archive.

Thanks to the support of the Japan Foundation, the major funder for the Junior Librarians Training Program, the comprehensive workbook prepared by JLTS instructors has been converted to PDF format and will soon be available on the NCC site in easily downloadable modules that will be useful to librarians, Japanese Studies faculty and students alike. Please check the NCC's Workbook site for future development on the web publication of the JLTS Workbook and of other instructional materials being developed at http://www.nccjapan.org/workbook.html.

The explosive growth of new Japanese language information resources has produced a staggeringly large and impressive body of digital resources available online, through electronic subscriptions, and in CD and DVD formats. These new materials present a wealth of new research opportunities for those who know how to find and navigate these new resources. However, because of the complexity of using these diverse sources and the challenge of keeping abreast of their proliferation, the NCC is now working to develop a series of workshops that will train a group of librarian-instructors who specialize in training users in these resources. If funding currently pending from the Japan Foundation is received, the Training the Trainers (T-3) Project will begin in April 2004 with a series of workshops for instructors. The T-3 Project will also develop a regional training network of individuals and organizations that will help the NCC coordinate and offer future hands-on instruction in digital resources to users in various regions of North America. A PDF version of the NCC's T-3 Project Proposal is available online at http://www.nccjapan.org/documents/t3.doc. For further information about the T-3 Project and future training efforts please contact NCC Executive Director Victoria Bestor at vbestor@fas.harvard.edu.

Travel and Small Grants to Support Library Research

Short term travel grants are available for research on Japan from the Northeast Asia Council of the AAS at http://www.aasianst.org/grants/main.htm. Also the Japan Foundation offers short term research grants that provide travel and a per diem. Find these at http://www.jfny.org.

Many East Asian libraries in North American offer small travel grants to scholars or students to use the resources in their collection for research and writing. Kristina Troost, East Asian Studies Librarian at Duke University and former NCC Chair maintains a comprehensive list of institutions that offer such grants with links, grant amounts, and application deadlines at http://library.duke.edu/research/subject/guides/japan/institutions/libraries/grants.html.

Proposal Writing: Grantsmanship

A concise guide to proposal writing written by the Director of the Japan United States Friendship Commission, Eric Gangloff.