Grant Writing for Librarians – CE400

Date: Tuesday, May 19, 2026, 1:00pm–5:00pm

All MLA ’26 CE courses will take place on Tuesday, May 19, 2026, in Milwaukee, WI. Courses are not available virtually.

To register, see MLA ’26 Registration

This hands-on workshop aims to help librarians gain practical skills to outline a concept paper and proposal brief. Grants have long been a tool that allows libraries to increase their reach and offer access to more communities. Libraries are seen as a trusted bridge connecting communities with information and resources. They are often at the intersection of various disciplines, projects, and funding opportunities, making librarians a natural fit to lead grant development. The shifting realities of public, academic, and health sciences libraries today necessitate that information professionals must, more frequently, seek external funding for such projects. Yet few librarians are formally trained in grant-writing, nor in marshaling together a team of grant-seekers with varying positions, experiences, and knowledge fields. In addition, the institutional support staff that might have traditionally helped with such endeavors has frequently disappeared from rosters due to budgetary constraints within their institution, meaning that librarians seeking grants often do so without the support often provided to academic researchers.

Using resources from The Librarian’s Grants Handbook: Understanding the Grant Process from Start to Finish, this session will highlight major areas in proposal writing, including identifying goals and objectives, budgeting, designing your evaluation plan, and tools and approaches to help you develop a proposal. Participants will leave with an understanding of the grant writing process, tools and resources, and an understanding of the next steps.

Important Note: It’s recommended that you bring a laptop computer with Wi-Fi compatibility to fully participate in the learning activities for this course.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Deconstruct the components of an active Request for Proposals (RFP)
• Identify the strengths and weaknesses of their own department/institution and of other potential key players
• Draft briefs and concept papers that address the above components

Facilitators

Abigail Mann, PhD, MSLS, the Digital Scholarship Librarian at the Ames Library at Illinois Wesleyan University, has been successful in securing multiple smaller grants to support initiatives including over $60,000 in funding, internal and external, to support building a Digital Humanities program for students, and working with other faculty members to obtain grants to fund OERs, 3D digitization, and humanities programming. She was an English Professor prior to entering librarianship and has extensive experience teaching professional writing at universities on two continents.

Tony Nguyen, MLIS, AHIP, is the Associate University Librarian for Rutgers Health Libraries at Rutgers University Libraries. He possesses extensive experience in health sciences librarianship, spanning over 15 years. He has a strong history of securing and managing federal grants, totaling over $10.5 million. His deep understanding of the grant writing process is further evidenced by his decade-long role as a grant administrator for the Network of the National Library of Medicine, as well as his service on multiple IMLS and NIH grantee advisory boards.

MLA CE credits: 4