The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is the primary source of federal support for the nation's 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute works at the national level and in coordination with state and local institutions and organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; to enhance learning and innovation; and to support professional development.  

In the Knowledge Society of the 21st Century, digital content will be created, managed, preserved and disseminated within an infrastructure that is seamless and virtually invisible to users. The future digital environment will include digital representations of accumulated historical knowledge as well as vast amounts of new content. Future generations of users will build on this existing information and preserved digital content to create new knowledge and forms of expression. Libraries, museums, and archives are vital components of the emerging cyberinfrastructure.  

Cultural heritage institutions are developing digital repositories to manage and preserve collections converted from analog formats as well as those that are digital-only. They are also leading efforts to develop tools, standards, and best practices to improve the management, discovery, presentation, and use of digital content. IMLS provides grant opportunities to libraries, museums, archives, and institutions of higher education for research, demonstrationl, and implementation projects to enhance library and museum services and for programs to educate the next generations of library and museum professionals. IMLS grant programs that support cyberinfrastructure include:

National Leadership Grants

• Research and Demonstration Projects
• Building Digital Resources
• Library and Museum Collaborations
• Collaborative Planning Grants

Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) is an umbrella organization formed in 2005 initially to coordinate the activities of the Association for Computers in the Humanities (founded in 1978) and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (founded in 1973). In 2007, the Canada-based Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH-SEMI) joined the Alliance.

Devoted to the encouragement and exploration of the digital humanities in all its forms, ADHO's activities encompass the publication of

peer reviewed journals:

ARTstor is a non-profit organization created with several aims:  

1) To aid in the transformation of education in the arts and humanities through the innovative use of digital technology;

2) To achieve economies of scale and reduce costs for the community by providing digital images for teaching and scholarship;

3) To facilitate efficient dissemination of content from a broad range of time periods, cultures and disciplines, making accessible large portions of our cultural record scattered across libraries, museums, archives, galleries and private collections around the world; and

4) To work with the community to find answers to commonly shared problems, including the development of standards and best practices for the creation of useful visual materials.  

As of July 2007, 750 colleges, universities, schools and museums have access to ARTstor's evolving library of close to 600,000 images and its accompanying software tools.

ARTstor seeks to play a role in the international network connecting educational institutions with content contributors, ranging from artists (such as the Roy Lichtenstein Estate) and photographers to museums (such as the Getty) and libraries (such as the Harvard College Libraries). In doing so, we work with the community to develop policies around sharing image collections, as well as to develop and enhance harvesting software and schema that promote interoperability (such as the Open Archives Initiative and CDWA-Lite), leading to the aggregation for users of images from disparate sources. We believe the coming years will bring continued expansion of an ever more decentralized environment. ARTstor's role in such an environment will not be that of the single source of image content, but rather that of a value-adding node in this increasingly networked environment. Toward this aim, much of our time has been spent creating or improving upon existing inter-relationships and networks, building bridges across the community and demonstrating both the potential and the challenges of facilitating the use of digital images. 

HASTAC is a virtual university. It is a voluntary international network that spans disciplines, institutions, the boundary of higher education and K-12, libraries, museums and other civic and community institutions. It includes top research universities, underfunded community colleges, HBCU's and other minority-serving institutions, as well as supercomputing centers, grid computing centers and major scientific research labs in the U.S. and abroad. HASTAC is pronounced "haystack" and is an acronym for Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. Since 2003, HASTAC has been developing tools for multimedia archiving and social interaction, gaming environments for teaching, innovative educational programs in information science and information studies, virtual museums and other digital projects. HASTAC leaders have served as consultants to U.S. and international organizations and governments on grid computing and cyberinfrastructure.

In 2006-07, over eighty HASTAC centers worked together to produce courses, seminars, workshops and public events on the theme of "In|Formation." Topics in that theme were: InCommon, Interplay, InCommunity, Interaction, Injustice, Integration, Interface and Innovation. The project for 2007-08 is a series of ad hoc podcast Town Halls on any topic of social and political importance to new technologies. All podcasts will be advertised and archived on the HASTAC website. In addition, in 2007-08, HASTAC will host the Digital Media and Learning Competition, a $2 million competition sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as part of its initiative on Digital Media and Learning. To become part of HASTAC, simply register to the http://www.hastac.org/ website and contribute.

Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg are cofounders of HASTAC.

centerNet is an international network of digital humanities centers in which individuals contribute time and energy to help each other find opportunities and collaborators, and share tools and resources. The network serves to strengthen the position of centers in their own institutions as well as to advance digital humanities generally. centerNet developed from a meeting hosted by the NEH and the University of Maryland, College Park, April 12-13, 2007 in Washington, D.C., and is a response to the ACLS report on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, published in 2006.

Since its inception in April, centerNet has added over a hundred members worldwide. A start-up committee elected at the NEH meeting, consisting of Julia Flanders, Neil Fraistat, Mark Kornbluh, Matt Kirschenbaum and John Unsworth, is currently adding international members to its ranks.

The centerNet website can be used to find information about jobs, grants, conferences and software. The centerNet email list can be asked for advice about everything from problems related to starting a center to problems in programming. The centerNet wiki provides a taxonomic listing of digital humanities centers through which international partners can be located--for a staff exchange or for a grant application, for example. Members of the network can post to the list or include an entry for their center on the wiki.

We invite all those who believe that their center is a digital humanities center, in whole or in part, to join the network. We intend the definition of "digital humanities" to be inclusive, with cross-over into the social sciences, media studies, digital arts and other related areas. This might include humanities centers with a strong interest in or focus on digital platforms. The definition of "center" is only slightly more prescriptive: a center should be larger than a single project, and it should have some history or promise of persistence. Those interested in finding out more about the network or in becoming a member should visit: http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet/.