Division of Preservation and Access The Division of Preservation and Access provides leadership and support to institutions and organizations attempting to address the problems posed by the physical deterioration of humanities collections in America's libraries, museums, archives, and historical organizations. At risk are the resources that constitute a significant portion of the nation's cultural legacy and that are crucial to all areas and disciplines of the humanities. The division also makes grants for the creation of major reference works -- dictionaries, atlases, encyclopedias, and humanities databases -- that preserve and portray the history and culture of the United States and the world. Also supported are efforts by institutions to ensure that there is appropriate intellectual access to collections that are important for research, education, and public programming in the humanities. In fiscal year 1997, the division completed the ninth year of a multiyear program for the preservation of brittle books and serials. When the two microfilming projects funded this year (involving seventeen institutions) and those that have been undertaken with NEH support at twenty-eight other libraries and library consortia are completed, the intellectual content of approximately 770,000 embrittled volumes will be preserved. Newspapers chronicle the daily life of America's citizens in small towns and cities across the country. They document the civic, legal, historical, and cultural events that have occurred in every region of the nation during the past 300 years. All fifty states, two U.S. territories, and the District of Columbia, are now involved in the Endowment's United States Newspaper Program, a national initiative to catalog and preserve on microfilm the country's newspapers on a state-by-state basis. At the conclusion of currently funded NEH newspaper projects, more than 130,000 unique newspaper titles will be available in a national database and approximately fifty-seven million deteriorating newspaper pages will have been transferred onto microfilm. Grants made in fiscal year 1997 also will preserve, provide intellectual access to, and stabilize a variety of museum, archival, and other unique collections that are important for the study of American literature, music, and history (including Hispanic, Native-American, and African-American history and culture); children's literature; the history of women; Mexican, Central, and South- American history and culture; the history of Poland; and Chinese, African, and Asian history and culture. In fiscal year 1997, two grants were made for regional preservation field service programs that will provide surveys of preservation needs, workshops and seminars, technical consultations, and disaster assistance for hundreds of cultural institutions in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states. Among the research tools and reference works receiving support in fiscal year 1997, were projects to create a comprehensive Dictionary of American Regional English at the University of Wisconsin, as well as the Assyrian and Hittite dictionaries at the University of Chicago that constitute the foundation for research into these past cultures. Other grants will make it possible for the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs in Oregon to compile a dictionary for the Wasco Indian Language and to continue or complete work on a number of major reference works in the humanities: the Encyclopedia of Islam, the American Film Institute Catalog of Feature Films, the Brown University textbase of women's writing in English from 1300 to 1830, the Database of Classical Bibliography, and the Encyclopedia of Chicago History. George F. Farr, Jr. Director Division of Preservation and Access