National Endowment for the Humanities |
Institute of Museum and Library Services | National Endowment of the Arts
National Endowment for the Humanities (www.neh.gov)
Deadline: May 15, 2007
New guidelines will be available in Winter 2008.
Preservation Assistance Grants help small and midsize institutions—libraries, museums, and historical societies, town and county records offices, archival repositories, community colleges, and underserved departments and units within colleges and universities and other larger institutions—improve their ability to preserve and care for their humanities collections.
Deadline: October 2, 2007
Grants for Stabilizing Humanities Collections help museums, libraries, archives, and historical organizations preserve their humanities collections through support for improved housing and storage, environmental conditions, security, lighting, and fire protection. As part of a stabilization project, support may also be requested to update location and condition information in the institution's database and for photo documentation of collections.
Deadline: July 17, 2007
New guidelines will be available in Spring 2008.
Awards are made for projects to preserve and create intellectual access to humanities collections, which, because of their intellectual content and value as cultural artifacts, are considered highly important for research, education, and public programming. When projects focus on a coherent subject-based collection that contains various formats of materials, applicants may request support for preservation and access activities that would be appropriate to their nature, condition, and eventual use.
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Institute of Museum and Library Services (www.imls.gov)
Deadline: October 1, 2007
The IMLS Conservation Project Support program awards matching grants to help museums identify conservation needs and priorities and perform activities to ensure the safekeeping of their collections.
Conservation Project Support grants help museums develop a logical, institution-wide approach to caring for their living and nonliving collections. Applicants should apply for the project that meets the institution's highest conservation needs. All applications must demonstrate that the primary goal of the project is conservation care and not collection management or maintenance.
Deadline: December 1, 2007
The Conservation Assessment Program serves as an adjunct to the IMLS Conservation Project Support program. Funded by IMLS and administered by Heritage Preservation, the program provides eligible museums with a general conservation survey grant. Applications are funded on a first-come, first-served basis. Museums that have received a grant for a general conservation survey through the Conservation Project Support program are not eligible for the Conservation Assessment Program. Museums may be eligible to update their CAP Report if seven years have passed since participating in the program.
The program supports a two-day site visit by a conservation professional to perform the assessment and up to three days to write the report. For museums located in historic structures, the grant supports a two-day site visit by a preservation architect or an architectural conservator and up to three days to write the report. As the preservation needs of a historic structure and the collections it contains often differ, this collaboration is vital to the assessment's success.
The general conservation survey or assessment (unlike a detailed collection survey) provides an overview of all of the museum's collections, as well as its environmental conditions, policies, and procedures relating to collections care. The assessment report assists the institution by: 1) providing recommendations and priorities for conservation actions, both immediate and long-term; 2) facilitating the development of long-range institutional plans for the care and preservation of the collections; 3) serving as a fundraising tool for future conservation projects.
Deadline: February 15, 2008
The Museum Assessment Program (MAP) is funded by IMLS and administered by the American Association of Museums. It is designed to help museums assess their strengths and weaknesses and plan for the future.
The program provides noncompetitive grants of technical assistance for four types of assessments: Institutional, Collections Management, Public Dimension, and Governance. Participants in the Governance Assessment will be part of the pilot phase of this new assessment. The grants are awarded on a first-come, first-served basis after being approved by the director of IMLS. Museums may apply for MAP assessments in any sequence. Museums that received an IMLS grant for any given MAP assessment on or before September 1996 may apply for a grant to fund participation in that assessment a second time.
In all MAP assessments, members of the museum staff and governing authority complete a self-study and receive a site visit by one or more museum professionals who tour the museum and meet with staff, governing officials, and volunteers. The surveyors work with the museum and with MAP staff to produce a report on the museum's operations, making recommendations and suggesting resources.
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National Endowment for the Arts (www.nea.gov)
Deadline: August 13, 2007 for conservation projects.
Conservation projects are funded under the Access to Artistic Excellence category. This category supports projects that foster and preserve excellence in the arts and preserve significant works of art and cultural traditions.
Please note: Grant deadlines are subject to change. Check directly with the funding agency for the most current information.
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