Deadline: 18-Jul-23
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Division of Preservation and Access is accepting applications for the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program.
This program supports projects that provide an essential underpinning for scholarship, education, and public engagement in the humanities. It strengthens efforts to extend the reach of humanities collections and make their intellectual content widely accessible. Awards also support the creation of reference resources that facilitate the use of cultural materials, from works that provide basic information quickly to tools that synthesize and codify knowledge of a subject for in-depth investigation.
HCRR advances scholarship, education, and public engagement in the humanities by helping libraries, archives, museums, and historical organizations across the country steward important collections of books and manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings and moving images, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, art and material culture, and digital objects. The program strengthens efforts to extend the reach of such materials and make their intellectual content widely accessible. Awards also support the creation of reference resources that facilitate the use of cultural materials, from works that provide basic information quickly to tools that synthesize and codify knowledge of a subject for in-depth investigation.
Funding Information
- Award amounts You may request up to $50,000 for Foundations awards and up to $350,000 for Implementation awards. In order to enhance access to humanities collections held by smaller institutions, Foundations applicants may request an additional $10,000 (for a total of $60,000) to support inter-institutional planning and pilot activities.
- Award totals include direct and indirect costs. NEH anticipates awarding approximately $7,500,000 among an estimated 35 recipients.
Activities
You may use a Foundations award for one or more of the following activities:
- Analyzing and evaluating the content areas, intellectual control requirements, and preservation needs of significant humanities collections, including the development and distribution of collection-level descriptive information (projects to process or catalog collections at more detailed levels should apply instead for an Implementation award);
- Identifying and prioritizing humanities materials for digitization, developing project specific selection criteria, evaluating technical requirements for digital preservation and access, reformatting, test-bed items, and/or exploring third-party service arrangements;
- Developing plans and protocols to ensure the preservation of digital humanities content (previously digitized or born digital), which could include preliminary testing and evaluation of institutional and/or distributed digital repository systems;
- Creating editorial plans, locating and assembling resources, devising strategies for technological and programmatic sustainability, and producing content exemplars for reference resources such as encyclopedias, databases, virtual archives, etymological dictionaries, or online atlases; or
- Developing plans for and/or conducting collection surveys to inform future repatriation efforts, sustainable and inclusive collection development, or deaccessioning.
Eligibility Criteria
- To be eligible to apply, your organization must be established in the United States or its jurisdictions as one of the following organization types:
- 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.
- If your organization is eligible, you may apply on behalf of a consortium of collaborating organizations. If NEH selects your proposal for funding, you will be programmatically, legally, and fiscally responsible for the award.
- To be eligible, you must not function solely as a fiscal agent for another entity and must make substantive contributions to the success of the project.
- Individuals and other organizations, including foreign and for-profit entities, are ineligible.
For more information, visit NEH.