The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) provides support to the nation’s libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions to help enable long-term public access to significant collections of books, manuscripts, photographs, art and artifacts, sound recordings, moving images, and more through its program Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR).  This program, whose antecedents date back to the 1960s, also supports the production of reference tools, such as encyclopedias, historical dictionaries, and atlases.

Beginning in 2011, NEH’s Division of Preservation and Access conducted a formal evaluation of HCRR, focusing on grants made in the years 2000 through 2010. Staff surveyed 177 past awardees, providing them with questions intended to elicit both quantitative and qualitative evidence of project outcomes, often extending beyond the term of the grant itself. The resulting study provides information that may be of broad value to the cultural heritage community, including the impact of such grant projects on the use of collections and resources, on programmatic infrastructure, and on permanent job creation.

An article summarizing these findings and containing a link to the full report, has been posted on the NEH website.  We wish to express our gratitude to all who participated in this survey and to the American public for its support.  Please feel free to share this announcement with anyone you believe might be interested.  Thank you.

Joel Wurl
Sr. Program Officer
Division of Preservation & Access
National Endowment for the Humanities
1100 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC  20506
phone:  202-606-8252      fax:  202-606-8639
        email:  [log in to unmask]

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Visit the NEH Website at www.neh.gov

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