The Maine Folklife Center has received a three year grant of $339,411 (Award PD-50027-13) from the National Endowment for the Humanities to work in collaboration with the Penobscot Indian Nation and the American Philosophical Society to complete and publish the Penobscot Language Dictionary. In its current form, the Penobscot Dictionary is based on Frank T. Siebert's nearly sixty years (1935-1993) of field work with native speakers. Siebert was assisted by Pauleena MacDougall from 1979-1988, and Penobscot tribal members Carol Dana, Mary Lolar, Paul Francis Jr., Ssipsis and Peter O’Meara. The first manuscript dictionary was created from index cards; in the mid-1980s, it was then re-entered into a digital text file format on 5.25” floppy disks. This digital text and its 1988 printout (including Siebert’s later handwritten amendments) is the version of the dictionary that forms the basis for the present project. Much Penobscot language material is housed in the American Philosophical Society. Additional work with Siebert’s materials and other Penobscot documentation has been carried out by linguist Conor Quinn, who made Penobscot the focus of his graduate research, culminating in his 2006 Ph.D. dissertation in linguistics from Harvard University. He has since published other scholarly works on the language. Recently, Dr. Timothy B. Powell, Director of Native American Projects at the American Philosophical Society (APS) and a member of the project’s advisory board, has overseen work on the Frank G. Speck and Frank Siebert collections at the APS in preparation for the Penobscot dictionary project. In the spring of 2011, Dr. Powell secured money from the Phillips Fund at the APS in order to pay for the conversion of Siebert’s dictionary manuscript from obsolete floppy drives. Powell, Quinn and MacDougall will work as a team on this project together with Penobscot Nation Language Program personnel. Quinn will serve as the linguist for the dictionary project and together with MacDougall will finish the editing of the Dictionary. Quinn will use Siebert’s field notebooks, to locate Penobscot words not included in the current manuscript of the Penobscot dictionary. These digitized text files will make field notes more accessible to the dictionary project; the digitized dictionary files will be the primary source for the Penobscot/English dictionary. It will be published in a hardcover edition by the University of Maine Press, which recently published Peskotomuhkati Wolastoqewi Latuwewakon A Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Dictionary (Francis and Leavitt, 2008).