The University of Kansas Libraries and the University Press of Kansas have received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to convert out-of-print humanities texts into freely accessible digital resources.
“This grant for open books in the humanities offers the opportunity to advance several important priorities for the University of Kansas,” said Kevin L. Smith, dean of libraries. “This support allows us to bring wider attention to some of the excellent scholarship in history and American political thought published by the University Press of Kansas.”
The grant will provide the university with a unique opportunity to digitize humanities titles focused on history and American political philosophy that would be otherwise inaccessible to the public.
“I am thrilled that the University Press of Kansas has been selected as a grant recipient from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities,” said Conrad Roberts, director of the University Press of Kansas. “In collaboration with our Regents universities libraries, this grant will allow us to create an open access book collection that will dramatically increase the accessibility of information related to the history, culture, and politics of the United States to scholars and students in our nation and around the globe.”
The digitized works will be available in spring 2021 through the institutional repositories of all six Kansas Board of Regents universities — including KU, Emporia State University, Fort Hays State University, Kansas State University, Pittsburg State University and Wichita State University as well as available through MUSE Open and JSTOR Open.
For more announcements about Kansas Open Books, please visit https://kansaspress.ku.edu/kansasopenbooks follow the hashtag #KansasOpenBooks on Twitter.
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The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) was created in 1965 as an independent federal agency. The NEH supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the NEH and its grant programs is available at www.neh.gov.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation endeavors to strengthen, promote, and, where necessary, defend the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse and democratic societies. To this end, the Foundation supports exemplary institutions of higher education and culture as they renew and provide access to an invaluable heritage of ambitious, path-breaking work. Additional information is available at www.mellon.org.
