Grant writing is a principal activity for many institutions, but locating appropriate grant opportunities which match one’s deadlines and budget level is a challenging and often frustrating task. GrantSelect promises to make this task easier, and to a large extent delivers on these promises.
GrantSelect is a database of current grant opportunities in the following subject areas: Biomedical and Health Care, Arts and Humanities, Community and Economic Development, Children and Youth Programs, Education, International Programs, and Operations. Within the search interface, these subject areas are further broken down into more specific areas to help users quickly narrow the field. The subject “Libraries,” for instance, has 16 different subject areas that range from “Libraries, Academic” to “Library History” and “Library Science Education”. Although there is no help file, multiple subjects can be searched simultaneously by using the SHIFT and CTRL keys.
The basic search page is limited to three fields: keywords, geographic location, and subject headings. For more precise searching, there is a “show more options” button, which is rather hidden at the bottom of the form and does not auto‐fill anything that users have already entered. The most useful field here is the deadline field, which allows users to limit results to a given month. There is, however, no way to limit results to grants of a certain size. For instance, users who are looking for smaller grants, such as the $500‐$2,000 range, will not be able to exclude larger grants from the search. Some of the searchable fields, such as “Restrictions” or “Requirements”, are difficult to use effectively, since researchers may not automatically know the right words to limit their search. In these instances, reading the help files is almost completely useless, as search hints typically consist of a single sentence, e.g. “Enter word(s) which must appear in the grant’s Requirements field”.
There are over 9,100 funding source entries in the database. The search results are well formatted and extremely easy to use, with any restrictions or special considerations quickly visible. Information, such as the size of a typical grant, previous and typical winners of grants, a brief description, and contact information, is readily available in most cases. An e‐mail alert service is also offered to help keep users informed about new grant announcements in their field that are entered into the database.
GrantSelect does contain a few limited resources on grant writing, such as an article on proposal planning and writing, but the majority of these resources are advertisements for related books published by Oryx Press.
Institutional pricing for the entire database, including e‐mail alerts, is $1,500/year; this cost is comparable to that of competitive grant databases, such as the Illinois Researcher Information Service (IRIS) database from the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign (http://gateway.library.uiuc.edu/iris/). Overall, the interface is basic and easy to use, but helpful information on the advanced features of the search engine is fairly limited. The content of the database is outstanding, however, and will be of immediate use to anyone seeking funds for a specific project, or researchers looking to see what types of funding are available. This is a good, inexpensive resource for academic libraries supporting research programs with large funding needs. It will also be useful for public libraries serving patrons who are looking for community grants. Any sponsored research or grants office will be able to put this database to good use, and it would be well worth the money. It may be a bit pricey, however, for organizations looking for smaller grant awards. (Free trials are available from the GrantSelect home page.)
