I just wanted to pass along some good news from the “Stanford Encylopaedia”:http://plato.stanford.edu/ that some of you may not have heard. (This is from an email to authors that I imagine is meant to be basically public.)

bq. We are delighted to announce that the National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a $500,000 Challenge Grant to core library organizations which are building support for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). The terms of the grant require these library organizations to raise $1.5 million in matching funds from their member libraries.

bq.. You, through your efforts as authors and editors, share the credit for this award, which reflects the high esteem in which the SEP is held. But we need also your help to contact your university librarians to let them know about this good news and encourage them, if they have not already done so, to register their commitment to the fundraising plan. We cannot emphasize too strongly how important it is that the librarians at your institution hear from you and your colleagues, for they will support the SEP only if they are assured of its importance to the profession. All the information you need to discuss this with your librarians is available at “http://plato.stanford.edu/fundraising/”:http://plato.stanford.edu/fundraising/.

The NEH Challenge Grant proposal was initially authored in our office, then vetted and submitted by the Southeastern Library Network (SOLINET), acting in partnership with the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). SOLINET will act as the grant administrator, and will be responsible for coordinating the collection of funds from the consortia and libraries in ICOLC and SPARC. Note that ICOLC and SPARC are already partners in our funding plan, under which these umbrella library organizations will attempt to raise $3,000,000 in support of the SEP. Thus, if the matching funds are collected, the libraries will have raised 2/3 of their goal and the NEH will have contributed 1/6 of that goal.

In the first 3 months of campaign, ICOLC has registered commitments of over $200,000 from libraries in countries including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Denmark. While this is an encouraging start, we know that many librarians are waiting to hear from the philosophers at their institutions before deciding to commit their resources to the SEP. We hope, therefore, that you will make a special effort during this busy time to let your librarians know how important it is to assure the future of the Encyclopedia.