The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Division of Preservation and Access is accepting applications for the Preservation Assistance Grants for Smaller Institutions program.
Donor Name: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
State: All States
County: All Counties
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 01/11/2024
Size of the Grant: Up to $10,000
Grant Duration: 1 year 18 months
Details:
The purpose of this program is to help small and mid-sized institutions improve their ability to preserve and care for their humanities collections. The program encourages applications from small and mid-sized institutions that have never received an NEH grant.
Preservation Assistance Grants help small and mid-sized organizations preserve and manage humanities collections, ensuring their significance for a variety of users, including source communities, humanities researchers, students, and the public, by building their capacity to identify and address physical and intellectual preservation risks. The program encourages applications from institutions that have never received an NEH grant as well as community colleges, minority serving institutions (Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges and Universities), Native American tribes and tribal organizations, and Native Alaskan and Native Hawaiian organizations. Furthermore, NEH encourages applicants whose organizations or collections represent the contributions of historically excluded communities.
The Preservation Assistance Grants for Smaller Institutions program focuses on foundational activities in preservation and management of collections. Collections may include archives and manuscripts, prints and photographs, moving images, sound recordings, architectural and cartographic records, decorative and fine art objects, textiles, archaeological and ethnographic items, tribal collections, material culture, historical objects, special collections of books and journals, and digitized and born-digital materials. Supported activities should fall into the following general categories, though the lists of possible activities are not exhaustive:
Preservation Assessments and Planning
- General preservation assessments
- Digital preservation assessments
- Conservation assessments
- Assessing environmental impacts of lighting systems or aging mechanical systems
Preventive Care
- Purchase, shipping, and installation costs of storage and preservation supplies, including durable furniture and supplies (e.g., cabinetry, shelving units, storage containers, boxes, folders, and sleeves) for the purpose of rehousing collections for long-term storage or display, digital storage (e.g., external hard drives, RAID, NAS, LTO systems, and cloudbased storage), and discrete and reversible units to improve the environment (e.g., portable dehumidifiers, air conditioning units, UV filtering shades, and HEPA vacuums). Project expenses such as storage furniture, UV filters, or discrete units for air conditioning must demonstrate that they will not make irreversible changes to buildings.
- Implementing and improving environmental monitoring and/or integrated pest management programs, including the purchase of necessary monitoring supplies and related tracking software
Collections Management
- Initial steps that improve the management of collections and knowledge of the contents of collections, such as location and format surveys, inventories, updating condition reports, and/or other preparatory steps toward description of collections
- Workshops and/or training courses for staff and volunteers that address intellectual control topics such as best practices for arrangement, description, and cataloging of collections
Funding Information
You may request up to $10,000. This includes the sum of direct and indirect costs. NEH anticipates awarding approximately $650,000 among an estimated 65 recipients.
Period of performance
You may request a period of performance between one year and eighteen months with a start date between September 1, 2024, and December 1, 2024.
Eligibility Criteria
To be eligible to apply, your organization must be established in the United States or its jurisdictions as one of the following:
- a nonprofit organization recognized as tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code
- an accredited institution of higher education (public or nonprofit)
- a state or local government or one of their agencies
- a federally recognized Native American Tribal government
Individuals and other organizations, including foreign and for-profit entities, are ineligible.
For more information, visit Grants.gov.
