NISO Webinar, Grants - Support for Writing & Application, April 13, 2022

Helping people gain a greater understanding of the information community — our issues and concerns, challenges and opportunities — is core to NISO's mission. Our events are a key element of this, with our popular webinar program at their heart. And, following the NISO/NFAIS merger earlier this year, all NISO members can now attend all 14 webinars in 2020 completely free of charge! This includes an unlimited number of places and full access to a recording of each webinar for anyone who is unable to attend the event itself.

Bess de Farber, chief ASKer at ASK Associates, has had four careers: as a musician and music teacher; as a program officer managing grant awards for Arts & Cultural, Social Services, and Human and Race Relations; as a consultant for nonprofits seeking grant funding, collaborations, and strategic planning; and as an academic research development professional for the University of Arizona and University of Florida. She has provided grantseeking instruction and collaboration workshops to thousands of library, nonprofit and academic professionals, over 32 years, and has led teams to secure millions in funding for nonprofits and academic libraries. Bess is the author of Collaborative Grant-Seeking: A practical guide for librarians, and Creating Fundable Grant Proposals: Profiles of innovative partnerships, and coauthor of Collaborating with Strangers: Facilitating workshops in libraries, classes, and nonprofits. She holds a Bachelor of Music from the University of Southern California, and a Master of Nonprofit Management from Florida Atlantic University.

Carly Strasser is the Program Manager for Open Science in Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Science Program.

Previously Strasser was the Director of Alliances and Data Strategy at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. She led a team to strategically support data-intensive research at Fred Hutch through internal and external partnerships, community building, infrastructure development, and new initiatives designed to facilitate data science. She was also a Program Officer for the Data-Driven Discovery Initiative, an effort within the Moore Foundation’s Science Program focused on promoting academic data science.

Ms. Strasser holds a B.A. in Marine Science and a Ph.D. in Biological Oceanography from the MIT/WHOI Joint Program. 

Gillian Harrison Cain is the Director of Member Programs at Atla. Gillian and her team focus on the member experience, including administration of programs and projects; organization of virtual and in-person educational and professional development events; and implementation of member engagement activities. She has experience researching trends and technologies in libraries; creating content for effective communications; consortial licensing; managing customer relationship and content management software projects; grant writing and management; and product development. Previous positions include Senior Marketing Manager at Serials Solutions; Director of Marketing and Program Development at BCR; and Global Product Manager for NetLibrary at OCLC; and working at Denver Public Library and Douglas County Libraries. Gillian holds a BS in Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines and an MLIS from the University of Denver. In June 2021, she earned her Certified Association Executive (CAE) credential from the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE).

Mitch Fraas is a senior curator at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. He has a PhD in history from Duke University and is interested in book history, digital humanities provenance studies in a broad range of areas including the trade in South Asian manuscripts and the quantitative study of the movement of textual objects over time. He has also helped lead several large digitization grant projects including the 2018-2021 Manuscripts of the Muslim World initiative.