This program supports projects that provide an essential underpinning 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.
What’s New for 2012
This year the program has introduced a new grant subcategory: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Foundations grants. These grants support the formative stages of planning, assessment, and pilot activities for initiatives to preserve and create access to humanities collections or to produce reference resources. Drawing upon the cooperation of humanities scholars and technical specialists, such projects might encompass efforts to prepare for establishing intellectual control of collections, to develop plans and priorities for digitizing collections, to solidify collaborative frameworks and strategic plans for complex digital reference resources, or to produce preliminary versions of online collections or resources.
Program Statistics
In the last five competitions the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program received an average of 220 applications per year. The program made an average of 35 awards per year, for a funding ratio of 16 percent.
The number of applications to an NEH grant program can vary widely from year to year, as can the funding ratio. Information about the average number of applications and awards in recent competitions is meant only to provide historical context for the current competition. Information on the number of applications and awards in individual competitions is available from preservation@neh.gov.
Questions?
Program questions should be directed to NEH's Division of Preservation and Access at 202-606-8570 or preservation@neh.gov. Hearing-impaired applicants can contact NEH via TDD at 1-866-372-2930.
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