The New York State Library is part of a nationwide network of some 225 Foundation Center cooperating collections located in libraries across the United States and abroad. The Foundation Center disseminates current information on foundation and corporate giving through its publications and services available at these sites.
Foundation Center publications form the core of the collection. They include:
The Library also purchases additional resources for grants research. These include handbooks and texts about proposal writing, grants to individuals, nonprofit management and boards, and various books about fundraising and development. Federal and state fundraising resources are available, as are magazines and newspapers written for the grants professional.
Nonprofit development professionals, grantmakers, and individual grantseekers may find the collection useful. Public agencies may identify private or federal sources of funding. Researchers may use the collection during regular Library hours.
Services include reference librarians to assist visitors, free orientations and workshops, online search services, and facilities for individual electronic research.
Reference staff will supply simple factual data from reference directories in response to telephone requests. They will assist researchers in the use of reference books, but they will not perform grants research for individuals or recommend funding sources.
Appointments for grants collections orientations are made through the Reference Desk.
The Library's Electronic Reference Station (ERS) on the public floor includes the Foundation Center's database on CD-ROM. FC Search covers all known US grantmakers--over 80,000 foundations, corporate givers, and public charity grantmakers. It lists over 360,000 trustees, officers and donors. It links to over 5,500 grantmaker web sites and more than 3,100 corporate web sites. It includes a grants file of over 388,000 grants linked to the largest United States funders. The database is fully searchable in 21 search fields using Boolean operators. Save or print features make it easy to output results to a disk or printer. FC Search is available to the public during Library hours.
This database includes North America's government programs, foundations, and corporations searchable by funder organization name, location, recipients and more. Advanced "Data Visualization" capability allows BIG Online to create pie-charts and maps for researchers. Search results are highlighted; if advanced search option is used, researchers will find related terms also highlighted. IRS Form 990s are completely keyword searchable. BIG Online is available onsite from the New York State Library's web site.
Created especially for individual grantseekers-students, artists, academic researchers, libraries, and financial aid officers, the Foundation Grants to Individuals Online data contains detailed descriptions of more than 6,100 foundations that fund individuals. Records include current data on funder interests, types of support available, application requirements, contact names and address of grantmaker. Updated quarterly, and user friendly, this resource is available during Library hours.
Reference staff are available to perform online searches for a fee for researchers who cannot visit the collection. Cost is approximately forty dollars for a basic search.
The Foundation Center web site is available to the public on internet terminals located in the New York State Library's Electronic Reference Station area. Besides providing a gateway to more than 2,400 grantmaker web sites, the Center's web site allows researchers and grantseekers to order publications, visit the Online Library, query the online librarian, examine the "proposal writing short course," download common application forms, review funding trends, and much more. You may visit the Foundation Center's web site at http://www.foundationcenter.org/.
The Library's Internet Bibliographies section has information about Internet resources related to grants.
For more information about our grants collection and services, contact:
Reference Services