Just want to alert potential U.S. nonprofit museums, libraries, and archives about new guidelines and some changes for the Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections grant program, offered by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Grants will be available to plan and implement preventive conservation projects in ways that are cost effective, energy efficient, and environmentally sensitive and that aim to mitigate greatest risks rather than to meet prescriptive targets. Preventive conservation measures may encompass managing relative humidity, temperature, light and pollutants in collection spaces; providing protective storage enclosures and systems for collections; and safeguarding collections from theft and from natural and man-made disasters.
Planning grants of up to $40,000 and implementation grants of up to
$350,000 will be available.
New This Year: To enhance the outcomes of planning grants and to encourage incremental improvements in the care of collections, applicants for planning projects 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.
Such work could help demonstrate the benefits of sustainable preservation strategies or lead to new information or changes in conditions that would influence “next steps.” For such planning projects, the maximum award would be $50,000.
The deadline will be December 1, 2011. The new guidelines should be posted by mid-September, 2011 and will contain a more detailed description of planning projects and the range of activities that are eligible for support. We will send out a second announcement when the guidelines are posted. Please feel free to contact the division for more information by emailing preservation [at] neh__gov or calling 202-606-8570.