NEH: Preservation and Access Research and Development

These NEH preservation grants (different from the ones that support small institutions) support projects that address major challenges in preserving or providing access to humanities collections and resources. The maximum award is $350,000 for up to three years.

These challenges include the need to find better ways to preserve materials of critical importance to the nation’s cultural heritage—from fragile artifacts and manuscripts to analog recordings and digital assets subject to technological obsolescence—and to develop advanced modes of searching, discovering, and using such materials.

Eligible projects include

• the development of technical standards, best practices, and tools for preserving and creating access to humanities collections;
• the exploration of more effective scientific and technical methods of preserving humanities collections;
• the development of automated procedures and computational tools to integrate, analyze, and repurpose humanities data in disparate online resources; and
• the investigation and testing of new ways of providing digital access to humanities materials that are not easily digitized using current methods.

Deadline: May 19, 2011