Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

The Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program supports projects that provide an essential foundation for scholarship, education, and public programming in the humanities. Thousands of libraries, archives, museums, and historical organizations across the country maintain important collections of books and manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings and moving images, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, art and material culture, and digital objects. Funding from this program strengthens efforts to extend the life of such materials and make their intellectual content widely accessible, often through the use of digital technology. Awards are also made to create various reference resources that facilitate 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.

Applications may be submitted for projects that address one or more of the following activities: arranging and describing archival and manuscript collections; cataloging collections of printed works, photographs, recorded sound, moving images, art, and material culture; providing conservation treatment for collections (including mass deacidification); digitizing collections; preserving and improving access to born-digital sources; developing databases, virtual collections, or other electronic resources to codify information on a subject field or to provide integrated access to selected humanities materials; creating encyclopedias; preparing linguistic tools, such as historical and etymological dictionaries, corpora, and reference grammars (separate funding is available for endangered language projects in partnership with the National Science Foundation); developing tools for spatial analysis and representation of humanities data, such as atlases and geographical information systems (GIS); and designing digital tools to facilitate use of humanities resources.

Because ensuring the longevity of humanities sources is critical to enabling their ongoing use, applicants may request support for implementing preservation measures, such as reformatting (including microfilming), rehousing, or item-level conservation treatment, in the context of projects that also create or enhance access to humanities collections.

Amount: $350,000 (across 3 years)

Date due: July 15, 2010

For more information, click here.

Save America's Treasures

Administered by the National Park Service in collaboration with the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Save America's Treasures is an annual grant program designed to provide critical investments in the preservation of the nation's most significant and endangered cultural treasures.

Grants are available for preservation and/or conservation work on nationally significant intellectual and cultural artifacts and historic structures and sites. Intellectual and cultural artifacts include objects, collections, documents, sculpture, and works of art. Historic structures and sites include historic districts, lots, buildings, structures, and objects.

Amount: Varies

Date due: May 21, 2010

For more information, click here.

Hidden Collections Grants (pre-proposals)

The Council on Library and Information Resources, an independent, nonprofit organization whose mission is to expand access to information, however recorded and preserved, has opened the pre-proposal application period for its Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant program.

The program will award funds to institutions (including historical associations and societies as well as archives, museums, libraries, and other cultural heritage organizations) holding collections of high scholarly value that are difficult or impossible to locate through existing finding aids. Award recipients will create descriptive information for their hidden collections that will be linked to and interoperable with all other projects funded by this grant with the purpose of forming a federated environment that can be built upon over time. Funding for the program comes from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Amount: $75,000 - $500,000

Date due: April 23, 2010

For more information, visit the Council on Library and Information Resources.