SUSTAINING CULTURAL HERITAGE COLLECTIONS

To help institutions develop preventive conservation projects, NEH encourages collaborative and interdisciplinary planning, which may be especially helpful for identifying sustainable strategies.

Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections offers two kinds of awards:

• Planning Grants are intended to help institutions develop and assess preventive conservation strategies.
  • Planning grants must focus on exploring sustainable preventive conservation strategies.
  • Planning grants must involve an interdisciplinary team appropriate to the goals of the project.
  • NEH expects that planning grants will address complex preservation challenges, so an applicant must have completed its basic preservation planning and identified its preservation challenges and priorities.
• Implementation Grants will help an institution implement a preventive conservation project that is based on institution-specific planning.
  • Projects that seek to implement preventive conservation measures in sustainable ways are especially encouraged.
  • Implementation grants may cover costs associated with renovation required to implement preventive conservation measures, but they may not fund new construction.

This program does not normally support activities such as cataloging, documenting and digitizing collections. Applicants may request support for such activities only when the activities are a necessary component of the project's preventive conservation efforts.

Planning and implementation projects that focus on sustainable preservation strategies will be expected to create a white paper documenting lessons learned, so that others can benefit from the grantees' experience. White papers will be posted on the NEH website. 

Fit for public broadcasting: Public television stations are repositories of a significant amount of resources in the humanities from the projects they produce and broadcast. These materials, like those in any library or museum, require proper handling and archiving for researchers, students and the general public. In many cases, resources at public television stations are unique and worthy of the best preservation strategies. NEH is particularly concerned with sustainable preservation strategies, those that balance preservation effectiveness, cost and environmental impact. Applicants are encouraged to propose projects with an emphasis on defining and mitigating the greatest risks to collections, rather than on meeting a prescriptive target.

Eligibility: U.S. nonprofit organizations are eligible, as are state and local governmental agencies and tribal governments.  

Anticipated funding amount: The maximum award for planning grants is $40,000, for up to two years. Planning applicants may request up to an additional $10,000 to carry out one or more recommendations made by the interdisciplinary planning team during the course of the project. Grants for implementation projects can be made up to five years, with a maximum award of $350,000. In the previous three grant competitions, NEH made an average of 18 planning and implementation awards per year under this program.

Cost sharing is not required, but NEH is rarely able to support the full costs of projects approved for funding. In most cases, NEH Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections grants cover no more than 80 percent of project costs for planning projects and 50 percent of project costs of implementation projects.

How to apply: Prior to submitting a proposal, applicants are encouraged to contact program officers who can offer advice about preparing the proposal and review preliminary proposal drafts that are submitted at least six weeks before the deadline. Draft proposals should be submitted by email attachment.

Applications for this program must be obtained and submitted via Grants.gov. As part of the Grants.gov registration process, applicants are required to register, and maintain registration, with the Central Contractor Registration (CCR). Online submission requires registration, a process that usually takes three to five business days but can take as long as four weeks. Be sure to visit Grants.gov and begin registering well in advance of the deadline.

Resources:
Program notice
Program website
Successful proposal: American Precision Museum
Successful proposal: City of Ontario
Successful proposal: Genesee Country Village
Sustainable preservation strategy resource: The Plus/Minus Dilemma: The Way Forward in Environmental Guidelines from the American Institute for Conservation
Sustainable preservation strategy resource: Plan for Preservation: Assess, Prioritize, and Manage