Finding Research Grants: A Guide for Academic Business Librarians

This guide highlights the grants and funding opportunities that can support academic business librarians to pursue research and develop library programs that advance knowledge or services in the library and information sciences (LIS) field. Research grants provide financial support that allows you to extend professional outreach and collaborate with faculty, librarian colleagues, or knowledge experts. With the funding, you can get help from advisors, consultants, or student assistants and carry out the research easier with incentives for participants. Grants may also support you in publishing, traveling, or presenting the research findings. All in all, grant funding allows you to organize available resources for the project to realize a larger professional or social impact.

Finding a grant for your research or programs is a creative endeavor. You can look for grant opportunities from many different angles:

• Issues, topics, or subject areas - searching for grant opportunities for the problem you intend to solve. If it is a special topic such as financial literacy, international business, or open textbook, you may find a designated grant that supports research or projects in this area.
• Activities - what are you going to do? - are you going to build a bibliography, develop a curriculum, conduct empirical research, or gather references or open educational resources? Some funding may support specific kinds of activities.
• Beneficiaries - considering the beneficiaries of your research project, for example, librarians, students, entrepreneurs, small businesses, job seekers, veterans, refugees, minority groups, etc. You may find grants that intend to benefit a designated group of people and allow broad topic coverage.
• Impact and its scale- looking for opportunities through the impact that you are going to make, for example, student success, promoting equity, diversity or inclusion, achieving sustainable development goals, or contributing to the workforce or economic development. Does your study involve resources and deliver impact at the campus level, state, national or international level? Grants are always set up with a specific goal, impact, and scale of impact in mind. State grants may expect the research have a state-level impact. You would need to find grants with an expected impact and a scale that your project is more aligned with. 
• Methodologies or referenced materials - if your project involves specific methodology such as systematic reviews or relies on specific materials or collections, you may find grants that support these needs.
• Who you are - there are grants offered to researchers with specific demographic characteristics (women, people of color, etc.) or backgrounds (i.e. librarians, association members, etc.). Analyzing yourself will bring in grant opportunities as well.