Assignment 7: Trends in Preservation Grants

In order to discover trends within present-day preservation funding, I chose to look at grant opportunities offered by three funding agencies: the National Endowment for the Humanities, the J. Paul Getty Foundation, and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

The largest overlap between these funding agencies and, consequently, one of the major trends I discovered lies within the education and training of future professionals within the conservation and preservation fields. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) regularly awards grants each November to field service, workshop, and university programs within the United States that aim to educate and train. Dollar amounts have ranged from 69,000 on the low-end to 550,000 on the high-end in previous fiscal years. The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) also provides funding for programs and institutions that educate and train professionals. However, NHPRC places a specific focus on archives and historical publishing communities. The Getty Foundation (GF) has a more international reach compared to NEH and NHRPC. Grants from previous years having gone to such programs as a conservation training program in Lima, Peru, a training program on photographic preservation in Dakar, Senegal, and new interpretative programs at Boston's Museum of Art among others. These grants are of lesser dollar amounts than those provided by NEH, yet there seem to be more of them awarded. It should also perhaps be noted that GF and NEH seem to provide a good deal of funding for individual fellowships and conferences while NHPRC expressly declares it does not provide funding for individuals.

Another trend I noted among these agencies is the funding they - NEH and NHPRC especially - provide for access-oriented activities. NEH's efforts on this front seem to be largely focused on digital/digitization efforts - i.e. finding aids, searchable databases, digital imaging, and so on. NHPRC appears to be a bit more holistic in their approach, funding not only digitization efforts, but efforts to decrease backlogs by funding both basic processing efforts in order to, as they say, "encourage repositories to reveal these 'hidden collections'" and detailed processing efforts to reformat high-demand materials to increase access to the materials while preserving the originals (Archives - Basic Projects). GF is less explicit than NEH and NHPRC with regards to their funding of what this author presumes would qualify as access-oriented activities. They note a series of grants being awarded for the "arrangement and description" of various archival collections. They are not, unfortunately, any more specific than that.

A final trend I noticed deals with collaboration. Each funding agency - NEH, NHPRC, and GF - provides funding for collaborative efforts. Not all of these efforts could be considered preservation or conservation based. Some of the efforts funded by NEH include translations, archaeological investigations, and editorial work. Some of these efforts, however, could and can be considered preservation or conservation based, including GF's awarding of grants to the Fund for New Orleans to support conservation planning and treatment and NHPRC's grant for State and National Partnerships that seeks "to strengthen archives and historical records programs in each of the states and build a national archival network" (State and National).

In summary, the direction these funding agencies - NEH and NHPRC specifically - appear to be heading towards is one in which they place an increased emphasis and demand on access, collaboration, and education rather than on item-level projects. In NHPRC's description of their grant for detailed processing projects, they state:

If parts of collections deserve processing to the item level, applicants must provide specific justifications for this detailed degree of work and provide estimates of the percentage of collections to be processed to the item level.

Necessitating such justifications for item-level processing is virtually an echo of the mantra of Greene and Meissner: More product, less processing.