Chapter 2: Small Steps

Our process began with small steps, building towards a culture of open, and reaching out to other successful grant programs for assistance and feedback as we progressed. Amanda Larson at Ohio State University gave us excellent feedback on our initial draft of the rubric and the memorandum of understanding. Dr. Julie Papaioannou, Professor of Instruction in French here at UR gave us excellent advice for communicating with faculty. We gained support from our head of collections, Lindsay Cronk, by having clear goals and assessments in place. Through our subject librarians we were able to find potential grant recipients in different subject areas.

We evaluated each grant proposal on a rubric to determine whether the idea proposed was clear, feasible, and would have a lasting impact. The rubric and the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) are included in the Appendix.

We used Jotform to collect applications, and created an excel sheet to track our comments when using the rubric to assess the applications. Our goal all along was to use the rubric as a means to help faculty fine-tune their applications. We see the rubric as part of necessary pre-work to completing a successful project.

In our first appeal, we expected to have more small proposals. Instead, we had 3 major proposals. This was to be our “giant leap.”