The Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program supports projects that provide an essential foundation for scholarship, education, and public programming in the humanities.

Thousands of libraries, archives, museums, and historical organizations across the country maintain important

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collections of books and manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings and moving images, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, art and material culture, electronic records, 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.

Applicants should define a specific problem, devise procedures and potential solutions, and explain how they would evaluate their projects and disseminate their findings.

Project results must serve the needs of a significant segment of humanists.

Small and mid-sized institutions that have never received an NEH grant are especially encouraged to apply.

Applications may be submitted for projects that include or combine the following activities:
arranging and describing archival and manuscript collections; cataloging collections of printed works, photographs, recorded sound, moving images, art, and material culture; implementing preservation measures, such as basic rehousing, reformatting, deacidification, or conservation treatment; digitizing collections, or preserving and improving access to born-digital resources; developing databases, virtual collections, or other electronic resources to codify information on a subject field or to provide integrated access to selected humanities materials; creating encyclopedias; preparing linguistic tools, such as historical and etymological dictionaries, corpora, and reference grammars (separate funding is available for endangered language projects in partnership with the National Science Foundation); developing tools for spatial analysis and representation of humanities data, such as atlases and geographical information systems (GIS); and designing digital tools to facilitate use of humanities resources.

Applications may address the holdings or activities of a single institution or may involve collaboration.

In all cases, projects should be designed to facilitate sharing, exchange, and interoperability of humanities information and products.