Considering Funding

Projects with a Budget

After designing your project, consider any roles and responsibilities left unfilled, big ideas that sounded fun but would require a budget, or timelines that seem too tight but necessary. Raising money to assist with your project may avoid burnout if some roles cannot be filled with the group’s current capacity or if timelines are short.

Outsourcing whatever feels boring or insurmountable to you and your group can bring a struggling project back to life. You can fund small amounts of your project by getting the publication written into a grant project or applying for small grants.

The AI is for Access project group was awarded funding from the Society of American Archivists Foundation, and they used some of it to fund instrument development and data analysis. The Email Archiving and Preservation Interest Group funded an editor to manage community review and take their draft of Good Practices for Acquiring Email to the finish line, thanks to a regrant program for building capacity and community for web archiving from the Mellon Foundation and University of Illinois. I received funding from the Library Futures Research Network to cover my own labor to write, edit, and layout this project.

Projects without a Budget

There are many barriers to finding support for research-in-practice projects. Traditional publishing models, research methods, and other established academic norms are baked into many grant application assessment models, structurally omitting great ideas that don’t fit existing professional standards. Government agencies in the United States can unfortunately be subject to political influences particularly in the past decade where there are political strategies to regulate certain work based on ideology. At the time of this writing in 2025, research funding is declining in the US. Many funders are de-emphasizing work that is not ideologically aligned with the federal administration, by both forced and voluntary compliance. This guide covers as much as possible about the publishing workflow so you can be empowered to share your work despite the difficult climate for research in the US.