Dean's Innovation Grant
About the Grants
The University of North Texas Libraries’ Dean’s Innovation Grant, formerly known as the Green Light To Greatness Award, provided funding to research and projects within the UNT Libraries between 2013 and 2018 that promoted scholarship and contributed to the gathering of knowledge that helps improve our libraries, our university, and the community.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2022
The University of North Texas Libraries’ Dean’s Innovation Grant, provides funding to research and projects within the UNT Libraries.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2021
The University of North Texas Libraries’ Dean’s Innovation Grant, provides funding to research and projects within the UNT Libraries.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2020
The University of North Texas Libraries’ Dean’s Innovation Grant, formerly known as the Green Light To Greatness Award, provides funding to research and projects within the UNT Libraries.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2019
The University of North Texas Libraries’ Dean’s Innovation Grant, formerly known as the Green Light To Greatness Award, provides funding to research and projects within the UNT Libraries.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2018: Making Digital Collection A/V Materials Accessible
This project seeks to address accessibility compliance of A/V materials in the UNT digital collections.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2018: Improving Library Services for Patrons of all Abilities
This project is designed to increase awareness and mindfulness of the needs of patrons with disabilities and to improve services offered to accommodate those patrons.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2018: MYS: Don't Fence Me In: Engaging Local Music Communities to Preserve Texas Music
The Local / Independent Music Initiative of Texas (LIMIT) is an ongoing initiative to collect, preserve, and provide access to music that originates from Texas. LIMIT team members have identified a desire in the Denton music community for an archiving project.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2018: MYS: Make-Your-Space
Through a series of focused classes, participants will design and create physical or digital objects to keep in their Factory show ‘case’.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2018: Special Collections Podcast
This project is to launch a podcast dedicated to promoting and telling the stories of archival manuscript collections in UNT Special Collections
Dean's Innovation Grant 2018: Census of Game Collections in Libraries
In 2007, Dr. Scott Nicholson conducted a census of gaming to take a “pulse of the role of gaming in libraries.” In the decade since, both library game collections and game technologies have evolved.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2017 Awardees
The University of North Texas Libraries’ Dean’s Innovation Grant, formerly known as the Green Light To Greatness Award, provides funding to research and projects within the UNT Libraries that promote scholarship and contribute to the gathering of knowledge that helps improve our libraries, our university, and the community.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2017: The Portal to Texas History User Guide Video
The completely redesigned user interface of The Portal to Texas History has encouraged historians, genealogists, and everyday users to research their individual areas of interests. Internal user testing continues to uncover insights on how users interact with the Portal’s vast catalog of public records, historical documents and artifacts.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2017: It's in the Bag: Creating Sustainability in the Faculty Book Delivery Service
Supporting sustainable practices is an important goal of the university as outlined in its mission statement and strategic planning. As our Faculty Delivery Service responds to greater demand, we are becoming more aware of the environmental impact our delivery materials (plastic poly mailers) have because they are neither recyclable nor reusable. Faculty members have expressed concerns about the long-tenn use of these materials, and some have opted out of using the service as a result.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2017: Call and Response: Engaging with African American Male Students Through Culturally Relevant Music Resources
African American male students have the highest attrition rate. In Fall 2017, a new living/learning community comprised of freshmen males will meet for a one-hour course focused on the African American experience in the United States examined through the lens of African American music.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2017: Finding the Right Words: User-generated Description of Television News Collections
Growing expectation for digitized archival content means institutions must balance needs for access with quality metadata and embracing minimal description. For the NBC 5/KXAS television news collection, “minimal” description takes the form of keywords. Because employees have different areas of expertise and are not guided by a controlled vocabulary, description may reflect individual views of the material and its potential uses rather than metadata that is useful to other user groups.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2017: Escape the Library: Building a Better Library Literacy Escape Room
Escape to the Library: A Library Learning Escape Room Experience was a successful and popular option during First Flight in 2016 that incorporated learning objectives tied to the ACRL Framework into a fun, immersive puzzle-solving experience.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2015: Information-seeking behaviors of documentary filmmakers
Documentaries offer a wealth of information and are an invaluable source of information for educators and casual viewers alike. UNT has a healthy collection of moving image archives that could prove very useful to documentary filmmakers as they compile their works. The goal of this project was to understand how documentary filmmakers get their information, and what role moving image archives play in their creative process.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2015: Table Top Game Processing and Preservation
The UNT Media Library has a collection of table top games. These games, when checked out frequently and by many different people, could become damaged through heavy use. This project aimed to find a better way to preserve table top games so they could be enjoyed by more people. In order to figure out the best way of preserving these games, the researchers devised a project that would track the results of various game preservation techniques.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2015: Investigations into the Third Dimension
As 3D scanning’s popularity has increased over the past few years, its various uses span academic, government, and many other settings. This project’s goal was to determine the usefulness of 3D scanners in the setting of UNT Libraries, and to investigate whether the Libraries should continue to pursue 3D scanning, and if so, to give undergraduate students hands-on experience with the necessary equipment.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2015: Historic UNT Webmap
UNT’s history is a rich tapestry made up of many interwoven threads of people, events, and culture. This project’s goal was to compile this history into an interactive webmap, where students and Denton residents alike could watch the city’s transformation before their eyes and expose them to library collections.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2014: Expanding UNT’s Digital Libraries Reach to Africa
UNT prides itself on its diversity and its cooperation with international students and organizations. As such, the UNT Libraries collaborated with Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia to explore the feasibility and implementation of online education and digital libraries at AAU.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2014: Second Floor Space Planning
One of UNT Libraries’ overarching missions has always been to create an environment where students could learn and study. This project built upon this goal by observing other academic libraries’ study spaces and coming up with a recommendations to improve the second floor of Willis Library.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2014: MINES for Libraries
MINES is a program that is used for measuring usage of library resources through short, random surveys that ask users about their relation to the institution they’re using, their location, and general feedback about the resources. The goal of this project was to use MINES for Libraries to find out the reasons for electronic resource usage and information about the people who utilize them.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2014: Experimental Fundraising Initiatives
Denton sits right in the middle of horse country.This project is a reflection of that and encourage the development of fundraising projects to support horse and ranching photography collections in the UNT Special Collections. It incorporates the horse ranching community already within the area, and developing collections from their history and culture.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2013: Finding aid usage patterns and usability
Using a combination of web analytics and user surveys, the researchers planned to analyze the current usage of electronic finding aids at UNT within the context of the larger ecosystem of discovery tools available to researchers.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2013: Testing a novel method for the rapid digitization of archival materials
The proposed project sought to test a novel method for the rapid digitization of archival materials.
Dean's Innovation Grant 2013: Optimizing Satellite Library Collection Awareness
Satellite libraries with specialized collections pose a problem in terms of collection use and awareness. This project sought to assess current use and awareness of Eagle Commons Library facilities and collections, to optimize use of the collections housed at the ECL through targeted programming in partnership with the Digital Scholarship Co-Operative, and to facilitate coordinated use of all Libraries facilities in Sycamore Hall.