The grant supports a collaboration between the New York Public Library (NYPL), the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), and LYRASIS to enhance and improve SimplyEСa state-of-the-art open source e-reader application that is used by libraries to make ebooks readily available to their patrons. Planned improvements include enhancing SimplyEХs user experience (UX), particularly for first-time users, improving accessibility and document rendering, and upgrading the systemХs digital rights management. Additional grant funds will go toward promotion and outreach activities aimed at speeding adoption of the platform among libraries, with a goal of 1,000 public libraries using SimplyE by the end of 2022.

This grant supports efforts by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) to catalog and digitize the Wenner Collection, a unique collection of 3,800 rare books and documents that cover the early development of physics and astronomy. The collection was carefully assembled and annotated by David Wenner, a wealthy, philanthropic science aficionado, and contains works—some more than five centuries old—by Ptolemy, Galileo, Huygens, Halley, Newton, Laplace, and many early-19th-century natural philosophers. AIP will scrupulously organize, classify, and catalog the entire collection in accordance with international and national library standards. Grant funds will support the hiring of a rare book cataloger to make decisions about priorities, storage facilities for the materials that will preserve Wenner’s original ordering and grouping, and the hiring of a digital assessment specialist to facilitate efficient, high-quality digitization of the collection. Additional funds will support various outreach activities to facilitate user engagement with the collection.

Funds from this grant provide one year of support to Knowable Magazine, a new digital-native publication launched in October 2017 by Annual Reviews. Annual Reviews, publisher of a prestigious series of comprehensive, high-quality scientific field reviews, has a large following among scientists. Knowable is an attempt to bring that content to a broader demographic. Its articles use established scientific knowledge and research-based facts to highlight the issues society is grappling with, such as health and disease, aging, and climate change. Grant funds will provide general operating support and enhanced outreach for Knowable as it expands its audience, forms relationships with corporate partners, and moves toward independent sustainability.

The World Wealth and Income Database (WID.world), co-directed by Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics and Emanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman at the University of California at Berkeley, provides high quality, fully public access to comprehensive and reliable data on income and wealth inequality. Surprisingly easy to use, the website allows researchers, journalists, and the public to access raw data, read the methodology of how those data were collected and processed, and improve them through their own contributions. WID.world datasets combine fiscal, survey and national account data in a novel, systematic way that produces reliable income time series and minimizes well known problems related to self-reporting and “under-reporting at the top.” Funds from this grant support the continued expansion and improvement of WID.world. Plans include expanding the number of countries covered to include China, India, Brazil, and several African states; improving data on the full income distribution; using collected income data to study issues such as tax fraud; improving the sites statistical tools; and adding new data variables like gender and environmental inequality. In addition, the research team will hold several workshops to facilitate use of the site and improve coordination with other researchers and large organizations such as the World Bank and IMF.

Wikimedia Commons is the world's largest repository of freely licensed educational media, with 34 million photo, video, and audio files, and is growing by some five million files a year—faster than Wikipedia itself—as people submit photos and image-rich institutions their collections. Unfortunately, most of those files are not accessible either to Wikipedia text searches or to the rest of the internet because they lack good metadata. To address the lack of metadata, the Wikimedia Foundation has launched the Structured Data on Commons Project, an ambitious attempt to create infrastructure and tools that will transform all the media files on Wikimedia Commons into an accessible form—known as structured, linked data—that is machine readable and will enable easy search of the Commons by Wikipedia readers and contributors; by educational, cultural, and scientific organizations; and by anyone with access to the web. Once cleaned and integrated, the structured data for each file can be understood by machines and linked to other content on the wider internet. The structured data can also be instantly available in any language, answering a huge need for the 289 languages that comprise Wikipedia and facilitating greater interoperability among language communities. Structured data will also allow developers both within and outside Wikipedia to create software tools to help with use and reuse of these files. It will help contributors more effectively illustrate Wikipedia content and it will enable readers to more quickly and easily find the right media and share it. It will also allow for more partnerships with content providers and provide incentives for these providers to structure their media when releasing it to the public.

Funds from this grant support a two-pronged initiative by the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to significantly expand access to eBooks for thousands of libraries and schools across the country. First, DPLA plans to improve the curation and distribution of open eBook content by creating a new DPLA eBook collection, which it will make available to 16,000 libraries across the country. Working with authors, publishers, and both corporate and nonprofit partners, the DPLA collection will include at least 3,000 popular fiction and nonfiction titles, textbooks, and educational resources, all formatted in the highly flexible EPUB format. Second, the DPLA will pilot a new spin-off entity, which will use market-based methods to increase the availability and reduce the price of eBooks from publishers and potentially generate revenue for DPLA and its library partners. Building on work done with the New York Public Library, the DPLA will explore different revenue models for a nationwide marketplace for buying eBooks, with licensing restrictions, that aims to enable low-cost bulk purchases of eBooks for statewide virtual libraries, promising to significantly expand access to eBooks to millions across the country.

Annual Reviews is a nonpro?t publisher of a prestigious series of multi?author reviews in 46 discipline?speci?c ?elds in natural and social science. From analytic chemistry to economics to virology, these reviews are considered authoritative syntheses of scienti?c developments in each ?eld as determined by 600 leading scientists and academics. Funds from this grant provide partial support for the launch of a digital magazine that would utilize its treasure trove of research to inform the public discourse. This new, web?based magazine will use essays, interviews, videos, podcasts, infographics, and animations to engage a broad audience and will feature the latest scienti?c research on a wide range of subjects, highlighting the real?world signi?cance of scienti?c research and demonstrating how it can illuminate subjects that might otherwise appear opaque, confusing, or controversial. Beyond the research community, the magazine is aimed at non–research professionals, the media, educators and students, policy specialists, patients and patient advocates, and the general public. The magazine would produce five to ten substantive text and multimedia items per week, plus one long video per month and weekly short videos. All items will be supported by two to three AR reviews freely available for a speci?ed period, allowing readers a deep dive into popular social issues. In addition, all magazine content will be free to read and with appropriate attribution to republish online and in print, signi?cantly increasing its value for research, education, and innovation and multiplying the readership, especially on social media.

This grant supports the Digital Public Library of America to expand its nationwide service hub network. Service hubs are on-ramps in each state for uploading and sharing digital content from the smallest private collection in a remote rural library to the largest state library or museum. As such, they are the key to DPLA's grass-roots, bottom-up, decentralized approach to building a national digital library. Hubs host locally provided digital content for the DPLA, correct and add metadata to uploaded items, coordinate local events and public outreach, and collaborate with state cultural institutions on digital initiatives. Grant funds will allow the DPLA to add eight new service hubs to its current roster of 15, increasing coverage by 50 percent and moving the institution closer to its goal of being a truly national digital library. Funds from this grant also support a DPLA initiative to partner with authors, publishers, libraries, and the White House to launch a new service network that provides free eBooks to children.