NHPRC Digitizing Historical Records

The Commission seeks proposals that use cost-effective methods to digitize nationally-significant historical record collections and make the digital versions freely available on the Internet. Project must make use of existing holdings of historical repositories and be made up of entire collections or series. The materials should already be available to the public at the archives and described so that projects can re-use existing information to create metadata for the digitized collection. Applicants must have the permission of all relevant copyright holders, where possible.

To make these projects as widely useful as possible for archives, historical repositories, and researchers, the applications will be evaluated on:

1. The national significance of the collections or records series to be digitized;
2. An effective work flow that repurposes existing descriptive material, rather than create new metadata about the records;
3. Reasonable costs and standards for the project as well as sustainable preservation plans for the resulting digital records;
4. Well-designed plans that evaluate the use of the digitized materials and the effectiveness of the methods employed in digitizing and displaying the materials.

A grant normally is for 1 to 3 years and up to $150,000. The Commission expects to make up to 3 grants in this category, for a total of up to $300,000. The Commission provides no more than 50 percent of the costs of Digitizing Historical Records projects.

Deadline: May 5, 2009 Challenge grants augment or establish endowments that support humanities activities in education, public programming, scholarly research, and preservation. Examples include:

• faculty and staff positions,
• fellowships,
• lecture or exhibition series,
• visiting scholars or consultants,
• publishing subventions,
• maintenance of facilities,
• faculty and staff development,
• acquisitions, and
• preservation or conservation programs.

Deadline: May 5, 2009 Challenge grants augment or establish endowments that support humanities activities in education, public programming, scholarly research, and preservation. Institutions may use the income from invested funds to meet ongoing humanities-related costs. Examples include:

• faculty and staff positions,
• fellowships,
• lecture or exhibition series,
• visiting scholars or consultants,
• publishing subventions,
• maintenance of facilities,
• faculty and staff development,
• acquisitions, and
• preservation or conservation programs.

Deadline: July 1, 2009 These grants support national or regional (multi-state) education and training programs on the care and management of, and the creation of intellectual access to, library, archival, and material culture collections.

• digitizing collections;
• arranging and describing archival and manuscript collections;
• cataloging collections of printed works, photographs, recorded sound, moving image, art, and material culture;
• preservation reformatting;
• deacidification of collections; and
• preserving and improving access to humanities resources in “born digital” form.

Deadline: February 18, 2009

The goals of the Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program are to:

• bring together humanities scholars and digital technology specialists from different disciplines to share ideas and methods that advance humanities research through the use of digital technologies;
• reflect on, interpret, and analyze new digital media, multimedia, and text-based computing technologies and integrate these into humanities research;
• prepare current and future generations of humanities scholars to design, develop, and use cyber-based tools and environments for research;
• devise new and creative uses for technology that offer valuable models that can be applied specifically to research in the humanities.

NEH strongly encourages applicants to develop proposals for multidisciplinary teams of co-applicants, partners, and collaborators that will offer the necessary range of intellectual, technical, and practical expertise. This program is designed to bring together humanities scholars, advanced graduate students, computer scientists, and others to learn new tools and technologies and to foster relationships for future collaborations in the humanities. Partners and collaborators may be drawn from the private and public sectors and include appropriate specialists from within and outside the United States.

The Endangered Archives Programme is offering a number of grants every year to individual researchers world-wide to locate vulnerable archival collections, to arrange their transfer wherever possible to a suitable local archival home, and to deliver copies into the international research domain via the British Library.

The specific focus of this Programme is upon archives relating to the pre-industrial stages of a society's development, whether in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, or even Europe.

These grants will be the primary means by which Arcadia will contribute to the urgent task of identifying, preserving and making accessible such archival collections before they are lost to international scholarship forever.

British Library Endagered Archives award winners for 2008

Overview of NEH programs

• the Certified Local Government Grant Program
• the Keystone Historic Preservation Grant Program, and
• the Pennsylvania History and Museum Grant Program

Foundation Grants for Preservation in Libraries, Archives, and Museums [PDF: 20Mb / 118 p.] is a collaborative project of the Library of Congress and the Foundation Center. This publication lists 1,725 grants of $5,000 or more awarded by 474 foundations, from 2003 through 2007. It covers grants to public, academic, research, school, and special libraries, and to archives and museums for activities related to conservation and preservation. This publication includes:

• an introduction that explains the book's coverage, arrangement, entries, and how to research using the volume. Note: This pdf file contains hotlinks to free online grant writing tutorials and introductions to foundations offered by the Foundation Center as well as to some other widely used non-profit guidance on preservation grants found on the conservation online web site.
• a statistical analysis of grant funding in the area of preservation by foundation, recipient location, subject, recipient type (e.g., Library), grant size, and foundation generosity nationwide.
• state-by-state descriptions of projects funded in preservation nationwide including the foundation's name, limitations on giving, focus for giving, recipient(s), size of grant, and purpose of the grant described. Note: This section is hot linked in the pdf version directly to more detailed descriptions of the foundations.
• indexes by recipient, geographic area of the recipient, and subject. Note: If you do not find what you are looking for in the indices, use the find feature to search the text for your term.
• a list of all foundations that have donated to preservation with their contact information and limitations.