Friday, October 7, 2011

National Endowment for the Humanities: Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections

By Michael Saunders


The National Endowment for the Humanities, or the NHE, is an independent federal agency of the United States of America that operate towards supporting the humanities through research, education, preservation and public programs.

In keeping with the NHE's effort to conserve the humanities, they have developed the Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections(SCHC)program, which aims to aid in tackling the complex challenge of preserving vast and diverse holdings of humanities materials.

The SCHC program offers two kinds of grants, the grants for planning and also the grants for implementation.

The planning grants are meant to help institutions develop and assess preventive and conservation strategies, such as site visits, risk assessments, planning sessions, monitoring, testing, modeling, project-specific research, and preliminary designs for the future implementation of approved projects.

The NHE will grant eligible parties up to $40,000 to initially support planning projects, and another $10,000, upon request and pending the advice of interdisciplinary planning teams, so as to enhance the outcomes of planning grants as well as encourage incremental improvements in collection care.

An Implementation grant, alternatively, is geared towards the implementation of preventive conservation project, which has a maximum grant budget of $350,000 per grant awardee. Implementation grants consist of implementation projects that are location-sensitive and are based on institution-oriented plans.

Upon the submission of their applications, which is often done online at the Grants.gov website, interested applicants will also be asked to submit project proposals describing their project and its significance.

The deadline of applications is going to be on December 1, 2011.

Institutions are deemed eligible once they are categorically a part US nonprofit organizations, state and local governmental agencies, and federally recognized Indian tribal governments.

According the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, the National Endowment for the Humanities is definitely the main agency that oversees the Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections program which happens to be aimed towards the preservation, creation, and provision of intellectual access to resources located in libraries, museums, archives, historical organizations, as well as other collections that are essential to research, education and public programming in the field of humanities.

The NHE will also support an enormous network of private and nonprofit affiliates, and even more importantly, provides generous grants for high-standard humanities projects to cultural institutions, that is; museums, libraries, colleges, universities and the like. Which describes why, in line with the NHE's mission, which is to "serve and strengthen our Republic by promoting excellence in the humanities and conveying the lessons of history to all Americans", they've already constituted grants that have and will eventually continue to help institutions sustain and preserve the American heritage.




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