Grants.gov team mulls awards database

The managing partners of the e-government project are determining the feasibility of a governmentwide grant awards database.Rebecca Spitzgo, Grants.gov program manager, said last month that applicants have been clamoring for one place to find all awardee information.“It’s easy to do,” she said at a luncheon in Washington sponsored by PureEdge Inc. of Victoria, British Columbia. “We just have to come up with a schema for award data and expand our use of Web services. We then would give the information to the search engine and expand the integration with agency databases.”Spitzgo said she briefed the Grants.gov executive board and they asked her to scope out the cost of the project. The Health and Human Services Department is the managing partner for this Quicksilver project. Spitzgo said that to create an awards database, HHS could modify the Grants.gov contract with Northrop Grumman Corp. She did not give a timeline for a decision on the awards database.