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, 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.

Applications may be submitted for projects that address one or more of the following activities:
arranging and describing archival and manuscript collections; cataloging collections of printed works, photographs, recorded sound, moving images, art, and material culture; providing conservation treatment (including deacidification) for collections, leading to enhanced access; digitizing collections; preserving and improving access to born-digital sources; developing databases, virtual collections, or other electronic resources to codify information on a subject 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 geographic information systems (GIS); and designing digital tools to facilitate use of humanities resources.

Because ensuring the longevity of humanities sources is critical to enabling their ongoing use, applicants may request support for implementing preservation measures, such as reformatting (including microfilming), rehousing, or item-level stabilization procedures, in the context of projects that also create or enhance access to humanities collections.