Additional Funding Resources for Research
RPC grants are a readily accessible source of funds to assist Library faculty and academic professionals with their research. In addition, the campus has additional sources of support for research and travel available to the Library faculty and academic professionals.
Faculty
- Campus Research Board — Provides support to Library faculty members in support of research. Awards are mainly in the form of research assistantships, equipment, publication subventions, travel to research sites, seed money (matching funds) to support other extramural grant applications, and extraordinary supplies or other research expenses. In short, many of the same sorts of research needs that the RPC funds, though the Campus Research Board is able to support projects with larger award funding. The application form, deadlines, and other restrictions explained on the Campus Research Board site.
- Scholars’ Travel Fund — Provides support to faculty members to present original papers at scholarly meetings. Specific dollar amounts are available, dependent on the distance to the meeting/conference. The number of awards allowed per year varies according to ones’ professorial rank. Find the application form, deadlines, and other details on the Scholars’ Travel Fund site.
- Grant Forward — The Grant Forward database lists external funding opportunities. You can search by keyword and limit to a specific area of interest.
- The Library maintains a LibGuide on finding grants, fellowship, and scholarships with a list of funding sources, resources in the Library’s collections, and resources for help writing grants.
Resources for Developing Research Methods, Instruments, and Analysis
First, of course, you’ll want to review the information from the Office for the Protection of Research Subjects (OPRS), concerning research involving human subjects.
- The Survey Builder in the WebTools Toolbox developed by Public Affairs Illinois allows faculty and staff to create surveys for wide distribution. Data can be retrieved as an excel spreadsheet or pdf. Survey submission may be limited to Urbana campus authenticated users, or can be made “publicly” available.
- There are professional software packages for conducting web surveys, including QuestionPro, SurveyMonkey, and Zoomerang. The Scholarly Commons maintains access to a Qualtrics account. Please note that it is an RPC policy not to fund software requests. You may find the following article useful, How To Effectively Conduct An Online Survey. Several Library faculty have highly recommended the following book: Conducting Research Surveys via E-mail and the Web.
- The Library has a number of resources in its collections to help explore research methods. Many of these are in the SSHEL circulating reference collection or online. You can find many key resources in SAGE Research Methods Online, which brings together many of the key publications related to various methodological approaches.
- The Library Assessment Committee is a great resource if your research involves assessment of the Library. Their website has information on library data and assessment resources. Contact the Director of Library Assessment, Jen-chien Yu (jyu@illinois.edu), for more information or to get help developing your assessment project.
- The Scholarly Commons offers many useful services including data services, tech support for digital humanities projects, and many licensed software applications not available elsewhere on campus or in the Library. CITL Data Analytics and Technology Services holds daily office hours in the Scholarly Commons to assist with data analysis–outside of the library this is a fee service except for an initial few free hours.