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Funding Opportunities Through The DSP Home Page

Brenda Wisnewski

Temporary URL:
http://proximity.cs.purdue.edu:6964/dsp/dsp.html

Funding

Funding, that is what the Division of Sponsored Programs or DSP is all about. What does this have to do with the ECN No Name Newsletter? Well, it means that we are announcing their presence to the Schools of Engineering. DSP's web site is a location where professors and graduate students will have access to information about many funding opportunities.

Even though this site is still undergoing construction, the Division of Sponsored Programs wants the Purdue community to have access to their services. To help professors and students find the funding they need, DSP has made available three different online searches, with a fourth online service coming soon. I had the chance to go through the DSP web site with the intent of looking for funding opportunities.

I began my search on the DSP home page, where I clicked on Research Services. This brought up the Funding Opportunities page, consisting of a list of links; I then clicked on the On-line Searches link. The four search options presented are Sponsored Programs Information Network (SPIN), the Federal Information Exchange (FEDIX), the Commerce Business Daily, and the Federal Register. We will explore the first two services via examples and briefly discuss the last two.

SPIN

The first online search I explored was the Sponsored Programs Information Network, or SPIN, a database containing over 6000 different funding opportunities from federal and non-federal agencies. Information about fellowships, travel, research, and other types of opportunities are listed.

1. To get to the online search, click on SPIN, the "hot" word on the first line.
2. Next click on SPIN Gopher.
3. Then click on Access SPIN - Sponsored Programs Information Network.
4. From this page you can access SPIN by clicking on Search Entire SPIN Database by Keywords and Text. For example, I decided to do the gopher search from this page. I wanted to see what funding was available for research on "hydraulics;" I was able to find five entries.
5. Returning to the Access SPIN - Sponsored Programs Information Network page, you can click on the Academic Disciplines link which accesses a listing of all the academic disciplines.
6. From there you can click on your field of study, such as Engineering.
7. From a listing of the different engineering disciplines, you can begin the keyword search by clicking on Search Keywords or Text, or you can choose a particular engineering field.
8. If you select a particular engineering field, it will take you to a list of funding opportunities that you can browse through.

FEDIX

FEDIX, or the Federal Information Exchange, is an online search available on the DSP web site containing funding opportunities from many federal agencies. On the FEDIX home page there are two other online searches, besides the FEDIX search. MOLIS contains information for minority students and the Traditional BBS Systems lists other online searches via telnet. After clicking on FEDIX, you can choose how you want to go about your search.

• The Comprehensive Information selection allows you to conduct your search from a particular federal agency, like the Department of Energy (DOE) or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
• The Minority Information selection provides research and funding opportunities via federal agencies.
• Cross-Agency Searches and Lists lets you find what you need by a searchable index of all participating federal agencies. Let's say that I want to find funding for research on "waste management." Under the Cross-Agency Searches and Lists link, I decided to search under the category of Procurement, Grants, and Assistance. From this search, six procurement notices are found. Under the Program Information category, I conducted another search for "waste management" information, and the search found 66 entries.
• Download Files is the location for an archive of FEDIX files, available in two formats: ASCII text or MS-DOS. Read through the list and select what interests you.

Commerce Business Daily

The Commerce Business Daily or CBD is a daily list of U.S. government notices that includes procurements, invitations, and contract and subcontract leads. Searches for funding opportunities can be conducted by a keyword search. You have the option to search the most recent CBD notice or those notices up to 45 days old.

On first review, academia may feel this listing is only for announcements concerning buying and selling merchandise, but this first impression is in error. With a little searching, grants and research proposals can be uncovered in this listing.

Federal Register

The Federal Register is a listing, compiled daily, that contains funding opportunity announcements and other information from federal agencies with keyword searching capability. Currently this database is not yet available as an independent item from the DSP home page. This will change in the near future when a site license is obtained. Until that time, you may access the Federal Register through the SPIN gopher server.

Other Funding Opportunities

The online searches are not the only means of finding funding opportunities on the DSP web. From the Funding Opportunities page, there is a direct link to the home page of U.S. federal agencies, ranging from the Federal Communication Commission to the National Science Foundation to the Telecommunication and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program. This page also links to Federal World, a comprehensive listing of various U.S. government agencies.

DSP has plans to provide opportunity announcements for each of the schools at Purdue. The Purdue Research Foundation has plans to list different grant programs. As you can see, the DSP home page is full and will be full of many resources for you to use.

Although the DSP web site is not in its permanent location, DSP would like you to visit their web site and use the resources that are available. Comments about strengths, weaknesses, and improvements regarding the DSP home page are welcomed by the Division of Sponsored Programs. An easy method for communicating is to make use of the "Mail" button at the bottom of their home page; fill in the blanks and then click on the "Submit" button. Once the DSP web site has moved to a permanent server, the new URL will be announced via the old URL,

Community of Science Web Server

While in the process of finishing up this article, I browsed through the DSP home page again and noticed that they had added another on-line search. The Community of Science Web Server is a database that allows the user to locate researchers who have the same research interests as they do. The database is categorized by researchers, inventions and facilities at leading U.S. and Canadian universities. Over 40,000 first person expertise, 5,000 invention, and 2,000 facilities records are contained in this database. The Community of Science Web Server also has links to the Commerce Business Daily and to some federal agencies that provide information concerning funding opportunities. the DSP Newsletter and by the ECN.

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