The Indianapolis Public Library Foundation has announced grants totaling nearly $3.3 million to the Indianapolis Public Library in support of projects designed to preserve the city's history, highlight African-American culture, and improve the library experience for immigrant residents in the community.

The foundation received $3.1 million from the Lilly Endowment to fund two major projects over the next five years. In preparation for the city's bicentennial in 2020, the library will digitize and make available for free one million pages of records, a hundred and fifty 3-D objects, and four hundred films, as well as a significant portion of the histories of the Indianapolis public school district, the Indianapolis Fire Department, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, and the Indianapolis Parks and Recreation Department.

The Lilly grant also will enable the library to create a Center for African-American Literature and Culture at its Central Library where visitors can study the works of local African-American writers and discover the rich heritage of black authors from Indiana and beyond. The center will have an initial collection of ten thousand volumes and be curated by a dedicated librarian.

In addition, the library received a two-year grant totaling $192,200 from the Indianapolis Foundation Library Fund's Innovation Fund in support of an effort to reach immigrants and non-native English speakers in the community. The grant will enable the library to partner with the Immigrant Welcome Center in Indianapolis to assist immigrants with library card applications, basic searches for materials, and registration for activities at select library locations. The grant also will be used to add approximately fifty-three hundred new printed books to the library’s collection of world language books, launch a digital platform for Spanish-language books, provide cultural sensitivity training to library staff, and help translate library promotional materials into other languages.