NEH grants

New Guidelines and Application Instructions for the July 1, 2002
Deadline
National Endowment for the Humanities
Division of Preservation and Access

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH
<URL:http://www.neh.gov> ) is a grant-making agency of the U.S.
federal government that supports projects in the humanities.
Eligible applicants are: U.S. nonprofit associations, institutions,
and organizations, as well as U.S. citizens and foreign nationals
who have been legal residents in the United States for a period of
at least the three years immediately preceding the submission of the
application.

NEH's Division of Preservation and Access supports projects that
preserve and make available the full range of humanities collections
that are important for research, education, and lifelong learning.
Projects may encompass collections of books, journals, newspapers,
manuscript and archival materials, maps, still and moving images,
sound recordings, and objects of material culture held by libraries,
archives, museums, historical organizations, and other repositories.
Grants are also given for the creation of research tools and
reference works (such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, and
databases), for national and regional preservation training
programs, and for research and demonstration projects that may
explore the use of digital technology.

In addition to the types of projects that have previously been
eligible for support, institutions will be given the opportunity to
define a corpus of materials of significance to the humanities and
present a plan of work that employs whatever action may be deemed
most appropriate to the nature and condition of the materials and
their eventual use.  Applicants will be expected to justify their
choice of a possible variety of preservation and access strategies,
which might include: microfilming, digitization, or the creation of
other types of surrogates: deacidification, conservation, or
stabilization; and the cataloging or arrangement and description of
materials.

Since the division will continue to require that any original
materials preserved with NEH support must be returned to an
environment that meets national standards for preservation,
libraries and archives will now be eligible to apply to the division
for grants to stabilize their holdings.  Such proposals may request
funding for the improvement of environmental conditions (including
climate control), the installation of security, lighting and
fire-prevention systems, and the purchase of storage furniture.

Prospective applicants seeking further information are encouraged to
contact the division's staff (at 202-606-8570 or at
preservation [at] neh__gov). The staff will also continue to read draft
proposals that are submitted six weeks before the deadline. Final
decisions for applications submitted to the JULY 1, 2002 deadline
will be announced the following April.

The Guidelines and instructions can be downloaded from
<URL:http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/preservation.html>. A list
of recent awards is also available at:
<URL:http://www.neh.gov/news/recentawards.html> . The postal address
is:

    Division of Preservation and Access
    NEH, Room 411
    1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
    Washington DC 20506 (U.S.A.)


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 15:69
                  Distributed: Tuesday, April 9, 2002
                       Message Id: cdl-15-69-008
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