13 February 2024

Call for proposals

As in previous years, the 2024 Faculty Library Budget includes a budget of EUR 100,000 for (preferably digital) ebook or primary source collections that are of great importance for research and/or teaching but are too costly to acquire through the regular acquisition process.

We hereby invite all employees of the Faculty of Humanities to put forward proposals for the acquisition of such items before May 1, 2024.

Criteria and procedure

Proposed acquisitions must:

• preferably be digital (although we will not automatically discard the possibility of acquiring print material);
•  be distinguishing, i.e. important for teaching and/or research that will help our Faculty distinguish itself from other Universities / Faculties;
• impossible to fund from the regular budgets allocated to individual fields (because it is too expensive);
• preferably useful beyond the boundaries of single institutes (although proposals for acquiring information in source languages will be taken into consideration as well);
• preferably one-time buy-able, without annual license-extension fees (although we might consider re-aligning regular budgets allocated to individual fields for the acquisition of something very valuable that does come with an extension fee).

If you have ideas, please:

1. Contact your subject librarian and draw up a proposal together with him/her; please consult our overview of the subject librarians.
2.  Acquire the approval of the directorate of your institute for this proposal.
3. Send the proposal to Marcel Belderbos of the faculty office.
4. All proposals will be tabled in the biannual Library Committee meeting, this being a meeting of the Library Directorate, the Dean and the Institute Directors, who will make the final selection within the available means.

Proposal requirements

The proposal needs to contain the following elements (your subject librarian can help you draw up the full proposal).

Motivation for acquisition

• Is the acquisition of relevance to a new teaching programme, in order to build up a sufficient collection?
• Is the acquisition important for a research project or grant proposal?
• Is the acquisition of relevance to a new research group, project or programme, or specific grants (e.g. EU or NWO)?
• Is the acquisition of relevance for the Faculty’s profile, does it help to distinguish the Faculty or the University, is it an asset?

Information on the acquisition

• Brief description of the content of the item;
• Comparison to other available items / sources of information;
• Uniqueness among Dutch universities;
• Quality assurance of the information / the item;
• Type of information (full text, bibliographic, data, encyclopedic, archive).

Additional information

• Title and URL;
• Name of the applicant(s);
• Subject librarian’s name;
• Necessary one-off expenses;
• Necessary structural expenses, and the budget used to cover these;
• Is a contribution from the research budget expected/needed?
• Results of the technical trial.