Grants and the Internet

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For students and researchers seeking financial aid or federal funding, the Internet offers the promise of reward. There are a number of easily accessible files on computer networks with a potpourri of information. Most of them carry no access charges.

You can seek these "servers" using Gopher, the search program ("distributed document delivery service") created at the University of Minnesota. Among the items you come across are a grant proposal guide from the National Science Foundation, grant and fellowship information from the Chronicle of Higher Education, the NIH Guide to Grants and Programs, grant updates from The Scientist, FEDIX databases with information on agency research and minority opportunities, the Commerce Business Daily, where access is restricted, and more.

For students and researchers seeking financial aid or federal funding, the Internet offers the promise of reward. There are a number of easily accessible files on computer networks with a potpourri of information. Most of them carry no access charges.

For example, you can point your gopher client to alpha1.csd.uwm.edu at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and, after exploring a bit, you'll come across this menu of choices:

Funding Opportunities: FEDERAL

1. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) Solicitations/

2. Air Force Office of Scientific Research -- AFOSR/

3. Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance/

4. FEDIX Federal Funding Programs Information eXchange, via GOPHER/

5. IRIS Funding Source Data Base

6. National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS)/

7. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)/

8. National Institute of Health/

9. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)/

10. National Science Foundation/

11. Office of Naval Research -- ONR/

12. U.S. Agency for International Development (US AID)/

13. U.S. Department of Education/

14. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency/

15. U.S. National Telecommunications Info Admin (NTIA)/

16. United States Commerce Business Daily/

Following the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency link, we eventually reach this menu:

Contracts (RFPs)

1. ADP Information Resource Management Support (AIRMS)/

2. Facilities Administration Information Resource (FAIR)/

Seeing this menu makes you understand what Internet veterans mean when they tell you that, while navigating, your mileage may vary. It also brings home the role of serendipity in resource recovery on the Internet.

Another excellent gopher site for funding information is riceinfo.rice.edu at Rice University. Here you'll eventually reach this menu called Grants, Scholarships and Funding and including directory listings like ARPA Solicitations, Biomed Opportunities from Yale, Canadian scholarships and grants from SchoolNet, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, Commerce Business Daily, the Department of Energy, and NIH Guide to Grants and Contracts.

John S. Makulowich writes, speaks and trains on the Internet. You can reach him via E-mail at makulow@clark.net or makulow@cais.com


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