 Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm Elsa Huxley from Heritage Preservation, and we're so glad you're joining us today. I'll just give a quick introduction to the community and these webinars, and then we'll move on to our subject for the day. Heritage Preservation is moderating the Connecting to Collections online community in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The site is designed and produced by Learning Times. The goal of the online community is to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. In developing the community, we have drawn on many resources that were developed for the C2C initiative, including the bookshelf and the Raising the Bar workshops and webinars. And links to these resources are filed under the topics menu on the site at www.connectingtocollections.org. We'll also file a recording of today's webinar there. About twice a month, the online community features a particularly helpful preservation resource and hosts a webinar related to it. The resources we posted for today's webinar can be accessed by clicking this photo on our web page. So today, I am very pleased to welcome our featured expert, Wendy Clark, who is a museum specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts. Thank you so much for joining us, Wendy. Will you please tell us a little bit about yourself? Oh, sure. Hello, everyone. I'm the museum specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts. I've held a few different positions here. I've been working with museums officially as a specialist for two and a half years or so. Prior to that, I was in visual arts and dealt with smaller nonprofits and smaller shops that do programming in the visual arts. And we also did some granting with special exhibitions that were traveling. And so I've been around museums for a while. Prior to that, I was in design for a few years. And before that, I was in Chicago with the Illinois Arts Council. And before that, I was at the University of Michigan. And I hail from Dayton, Ohio, but I've been living in Virginia, working at the NEA for more than 20 years now. OK, great. Thank you, Wendy. I will pull over your presentation and then start pulling over our poll questions. We asked these so we can get an idea as Wendy and I discussed about our audience. And let's see here. Some of these are open-ended. Our first question is about what type of an institution you're joining us from. If you'd please describe it there. These are open-ended chat questions. So we'll be selecting respondents from these to win door prizes. And those are some books that we offer from the Connecting to Collections bookshelf. Ainsley in Los Angeles, as Proxen Recreation. Region Conservation Center at NADCC, I'm thinking Angelina, University Art Museum, Museum of Art and Design. OK, and that's OK, Dee. Devote in saying collection mixed materials, associate curator, preservation specialist. OK, this is great. I'm going to go ahead and keep pulling over some polls. We've got a lot to get through. If you were applying or choose to apply for these grants with the responsibility all solely on you, 100% so far say no. That's good. Yeah, I imagine so. OK, and now to make some space, I'm going to pull away our first two poll questions. Wendy, is that OK? Have you had a chance to delicate them? Yep, that's fine. OK. If you answered no to question number three, can you tell us how many people you think will be involved in this application? And here's question number five. Have you ever applied for an artworks grant in the past? Are you applying for a grant of, this is a question about whether you'll be applying for the next deadline, which is in August 9th, or the 2013, the first deadline in 2013? More space here. Now, did you get rid of the one about anyone's past experience or applied before? Number five, let's pull back up one second. I'm afraid so. I'm trying to pull back up, but I don't see it. OK, but two-thirds are thinking about August deadline. Looks like. OK. Which makes sense, since we've got this time. OK, and then our last question was, what is the greatest challenge you're anticipating? There you go. We have a few more participants, too. Good. OK, you can continue. OK, there we go. Sorry about that, everybody, we're back. OK, so let's just look at these last couple questions. Looks like between two and four people will be involved in helping with these applications. And then two-thirds of the people are definitely planning on applying for this year. And the question about next year, more people were unsure. OK. Oh, and poll number eight was the question about how, do you know where that is, isn't that chat pod? Can you see it? I can't. Well, I'll pull these aside, and we can start with the presentation. I don't want to lose too much time, and I'll look for that question number eight. Actually, in the meantime, if you want to just answer the question number eight in the text box where we're typing now, what we were asking in that question was, what do you anticipate will be your greatest challenge in doing the application? So, and I see Nancy's. Actually, we have a question off the bat here. Wendy, if you don't mind, Nancy Ravinel from Shelburne is asking, if we're applying for a grant in August, preclude us from applying for one appropriate for the March deadline, too. No. You can apply for both August and next March. What you cannot do is apply in March and August of the same calendar year, which is our fiscal year. OK, Nancy, let us know if I didn't answer the question, but I think I probably did. OK, Wendy, so there's the presentation. Go ahead and start whenever you have a chance and to our participants, if you want to put in questions at any point, if we don't answer them during the presentation, we'll certainly address them at the end. OK, hold on. I just made it full screen. I wanted to go back to. It's probably one of those buttons on the top. Yeah. If you tilt the rest of that dropdown. Yeah. Now my arrows are gone, but I could probably use now my advancing arrows. Susan, do you know how to pull it off of full screen once you're in there? Oh, that looks like it changed. It's a toggle switch. So you just toggle back full screen, or I think if you hit your escape key. No, I don't think so. So you've toggled on full screen, correct? Yeah, well, on the side, I have the chat. I have everyone to chat. I just now don't have a way to advance my presentation. This is also, I'll just do a little experiment with my screen and see if I can answer it. No, I'm full screen. No, I want to go back. So you can see the chat and the slides. Right. But you can't see the bottom of the slides. That's right. And are you on a Mac or a PC? PC. Oh, do you know what I see? I'm sorry, excuse me, but I see that she got dropped to a participant instead of the presenter. So I think that's it. There you go. Does that look better, Wendy? Yes. Good, good, good. OK, and I think I've got the arrows all right. Well, anyway, sorry about that, everyone. I'm going to walk you through a relatively short presentation on the process for applying for an artworks grant. And then I've got some specific examples dealing with conservation and collections care. And I'll look forward to hearing any questions you might have when I get through. The NEA is obviously a public agency, a federal agency. We were founded in 65 to advance artistic excellence in the country. And we do this by awarding more than $130 million of grants per year. We support a variety of disciplines, as you see here, from dance to musical theater, music, theater, music, musical theater also. And of course, media arts and these other ones listed, of course museums. We partner with the 50 state arts agencies. And there are also a few territories. And then we have partnerships with regional arts organizations. To plan and prepare your grant, we basically recommend the first thing you do is to call a program specialist. We fund non-profit organizations with 501C3 status from the IRS. You have to have three years of programming under your belt. And we also fund government institutions like units of local government, colleges, and universities. We don't fund a few things too, such as construction or bricks and mortar. We don't fund general operating support. Everything is project-based. You can't re-grant our money. And unfortunately, we don't have individual grants either. The review process, you apply to the NEA. It's a peer review panel. It's the first level. The National Council on the Arts reviews the grants. That's a presidentially appointed body that they serve three-year terms. And then the chairman, Rocco Landsman, has the last final review. And the review criteria are artistic excellence and artistic merit. The next deadline for grants for arts project is August 9. And a couple other initiatives we have are Challenge America and Art Town, which those deadlines have passed for this year. We anticipate having them next year. First thing you do is you decide what your discipline is. And most of your cases here would be museums or visual arts, I imagine. And you select an outcome, which are creation, engagement, learning, and livability. Grants range from $10,000 to $100,000. Arts education projects have undergone a little bit of a change. There are two deadlines a year, one for community-based projects in March and one for school-based in August. Challenge America is designed to help first-time organizations in smaller outfits access the endowment with smaller grants. Art Town is all about the community and creative place-making. They stress partnerships. You have to have a partnership with a unit of local government or a nonprofit designer cultural institution to carry out those projects. That's a relatively new program. To submit your application, you first go to our website and arts.gov you have to register with. Grants.gov, sorry. That's a process that you should allow a couple of weeks for sometimes, because you might have to get other people within your institution to be authorized with you to have access to what is essentially a portal that's a requirement for all federal contracts and grants now. Everything goes through this central portal, and then it gets sent on to whatever agency. The artworks application, you download, fill it out, and then you submit it through grants.gov. And you send your work samples. Usually they'll be, in this case, digitized digital images that you'll submit electronically through something that's new. And it's sort of a portal that we have established, and it's called NEAGO. All this will make more sense once you're really in the process. But this is a screen capture from our website. So it takes you, you go click literally on this, apply for a grant, then you select museums, and funding stream, which is artwork. And then you identify your project. I've included here a sample of about six projects that were successful in the past couple of years that dealt, deal with specific conservation projects or collections care. You'll see the Courier Museum in Manchester, New Hampshire. They were in a multi-phased collection access project, and they were awarded $50,000 to concentrate on their European and contemporary holding. The Indianapolis Museum of Art recently was awarded money to conserve and document their Western European contemporary design collection, which is a really important collection of theirs. Scripps College in California, conservation of Chinese textiles, and the support was for seven specific works. Wichita State, we had a request for a second phase to conserve a mural, that is on the exterior of the Ulrich Museum. And then at Winniter, they asked for help to digitize their collection of works on paper. And then finally, the Noguchi Museum in Long Island got $20,000 to conserve specific drawings in their holding. This just shows you how you access specific instructions when you're actually working on the application. These, again, are just screenshots from our website. Grants.gov, I touched on it before. The most important thing, I'm not going to walk you through these, are really bureaucratic points here. But bottom line is do that as quickly as possible if you're thinking about applying. And you also have to update your registration once you've established an account with Grants.gov. I think it's either once or twice a year. You have to confirm that it's up to date. NEA Go is this new portal I was talking about, which we've designed to make it much easier to receive work samples. We used to get them through the mail, and that presented issues with what a carrier you were using, because some of our mail is still irradiated. So we had to use private shipping. So now we don't have that problem anymore. These are just some helpful hints. Make sure you contact someone at the agency. In this instance, it will probably be me. Look at the past recent Grants. Decide exactly what your timing is, because there are specific rules about the earliest possible start dates for each of the deadlines. And to make sure the work samples appropriately reflect what your project is. And then finally, my boss, Robert Franklis, director. And there's my contact information there, too. I'd be happy to answer any questions. Stacy Walsh in Lincoln asked that, I see the winter tour grant was a digitization grant. Are items such as hardware or a database for digitization excluded from the funding? No. As long as they're integral to the nature of the project, funds can be a line item in the budget. We like to see some other aspects, too. Of course, staff time and whether there's travel, or some other materials, or other things. But yes, that's fine. Purchase of hardware that's directly related to the project is OK. Thank you. So I just want to encourage our participants to go ahead and type in your questions now. In the meantime, do you want to tell us about an unusual application that you saw that was successful? Let's see. I'm just curious. Yeah. Well, let's see what. There was a really fascinating, relatively new organization in Greensboro, North Carolina called Elsewhere. And it's not a museum, per se, it's more of an artist space. But they hold, they invite artists to come work with their quote unquote collection, which is essentially a five and dime sort of notions store that one of the staff people had literally inherited from his great aunt or something. And it sort of sat vacant. I mean, all the contents of this store were still there. It had sort of like military surplus stuff, but also like an old fashioned variety store, five and dime store with fabric, both the fabric buttons, jewelry, socks, you name it. And they're basically creatively using this collection. And it's a real community space. They have a lot of events there. And that was funded in visual arts. So that's probably one of the more unique. Yeah, Google it. Google it. They have a really interesting website. I'm sorry, it was something special. It's called Elsewhere. Not here, Elsewhere. D-L-S-E-W-H-E-R-E. Now I'm going to check that out. We've gotten a couple of questions in. First one is from Angelina and Andover. Are applicants applying for conservation treatment funds required to have had a preservation needs assessment? Ideally, yes. But you can also apply for a needs assessment, taking it a step back. But usually, if there's a treatment report, it's going to make it more competitive. OK. Angelina, let us know if you have a follow-up to that. In the meantime, we have a question from Martin in St. Joseph, Missouri. Have you awarded grants to many libraries? Yes. Over the years, I think we have a project comes to mind that was in, I think it was San Antonio. There was a specific collection of posters and lithographs from, I think, was World War I and World War II that they did a traveling exhibition request. So it really depends on what the project is. But libraries are eligible. OK. Nancy in Shelburne says, in looking at the guidelines earlier, I see that you'd like to see individual treatment proposals for conservation grants. For a group of objects, could one submit samples of conservation proposals written by a specialist conservator along with condition and treatment needs information from an object-by-object survey? Yes. I think I need a little clarification, right? Do you mean if you don't have it for each object? Samples of conservation proposals. Specialist conservator. Comparing that with the survey. Nancy, do you want to write in and clarify that? That's what it sounds like to me, but. I should mention too, while she's doing that, that the short answer is yes. But like I said, after this session, feel free to call me and we can talk in-depth about specifics of projects. Thank you. And I'll also mention too that Wendy very kindly has said that we can save this presentation and post it online with the recording, which should be up in a day or so. So this will be accessible to you later. OK, so Nancy says, yes, it's unlikely that we could do individual proposals, but we do have similar information within the survey. And she'll be. Good. Good. Good. That will say the same. If there is any particular screen to a page of the presentation, that would be helpful for everybody to see again. I can pull that up if you have questions about anything more specific in there. Well, I didn't get into too much of the details about the actual project narrative, but it's essentially three pages, limited to three pages. And we help you with writing it, essentially, because we structure it with specific questions that we're trying to get at. So it's not as laborious as one might think. I mean, OK. And the project budget also is only two pages. There's an expense side and an income side. And then one sort of a one-page sheet asking for financial information of the whole institution from the past, current, and proposed fiscal years. OK. Those are sort of nuts and bolts. And we ask for biographies of key personnel, but not entire resumes, usually. And then we do ask for three years of programming history, just to see what sort of programming the institution has undertaken. That helps them assess the organization's ability to undertake a certain project. OK. Nancy has another question about multi-phase projects. She's asking, I guess, if someone's submitting an application concerning them, can you read where previous phase is funded by NEA? In other words, do you all tend to look favorably on multi-phase projects? They could be. I guess a few answers. Let me just jump in. Sometimes, an organization will submit a request, and the project will be huge. And they'll ask for $100,000, and we'll have only been able to give them $50,000, whether it was because it was at the middle of the pack in terms of its competitiveness, or if we just didn't have enough money, and one approach to working with that discrepancy is an organization can then turn around and say, OK, well, then we're going to phase this, and this will be the first phase, which is going to include the simple documentation step. And then they can come back to us the next year for the second phase. We don't, however, make it a practice to alert the panel. We wouldn't jump in in the second year and say, we funded the first phase of this, you should fund it. Because first of all, it is a peer review, and we're not trying to encourage, you know, continued funding of anything. And everything is evaluated on its own merits, too. So if the applicant has said that they received funding, that's fine. But there's no formal sort of structure for multi-phase. OK. We have a question from Stacy Walsh. But I think I'm going to jump ahead and then go back to it. Just because Erica Blumenfeld's question relates to what you were saying before we address this last question from Nancy. The programming history that you mentioned is that general programming of the entire museum or the programming of the department that's asking for funding? That would depend on, I guess, your institution. Typically, it's for the whole institution. If they were coming in for an exhibition, they would then highlight their exhibition funding. So I think that's really case by case. And it might be good to do a combination. Like if it's a conservation request, it would be great to talk about recent conservation, you know, recent objects that were conserved, say, as well as, you know, a reinstallation or a public art commission that the museum also did. OK. Stacy's question, are grants typically more successful when a project is focused on a particular portion of the collection, for example, 20th century American paintings rather than submitting a project idea that seeks to do all the paintings in a collection? I think so. I think it's better to zero in on just so that the panel can I think from writing of the application, it would probably be easier to get into the issues about impact, urgency, if it was a little more targeted. OK. Maybe it's easier for your panel to compare. Yeah, I mean, that's not to say we do get funding for entire collect. We do get requests for, say, all works in a collection. So it's, you know, there's a little gray area in all this, because it depends, of course, on who is sitting around the table reviewing the applications. And our panels do constantly change. No two panels are the same. So the other variable, of course, is what else is coming in in a given round. OK, participants, do we have any further questions here for Wendy? Wendy, thanks for making your contact information available later. Also, we have these group discussion boards on connecting to collections.org. And if people want to continue a conversation there, it's possible. I'll give our participants just a minute or two to put in any other questions they may have. OK. And Wendy, I don't know if there's anything else that you wanted to address. I'll pull over another question for them. No, it just looked like we had a little variety of institutions. A little, some good geography, too. I noticed we had Nebraska, Missouri, Vermont, Canada, Gambier, Ohio. I don't know if they're with Kenyon or not, but two people live from Vermont, Virginia, and Shelburne. OK. Ainsley, I hope I'm saying your name right, has a question from Los Angeles. How much time should one budget to apply for these grants? If you mean how much time it would take to work on it, I think you can do it in a week with working a couple hours on it per day. There are a few steps when you have to coordinate with other staff members with the budget and phone calls just to check in with us and everything. But it's quite manageable. And I've heard our application process is a little more streamlined than I think some other federal agencies. Pull up that screen with your contact information again while I pull over one last little link. This is for an evaluation. This is a really brief evaluation, and we pay very close attention to the responses that you give us on here. I hope I'm not covering up the contact information there on my screen. I'm not, but I hope I'm not doing it for everybody else. We review these evaluations, and we also ask for suggestions for future webinars. So I'm hoping our participants will take a minute or two to fill that in. I'll do the last call for questions. And I think that we're all set. So again, Wendy's very generously given her away here. There's Stacey for each of the deadlines when her awardee is notified. That's a good question. It's about an eight-month process. When you apply, if you apply in August, that round will be reviewed by a panel in the fall. And late fall. And then the National Council meeting that reviews that will be in March. And you'll be notified, basically, April 1st. And that's the August deadline is for projects beginning no earlier than June 1st of 2013. And similarly, in March, those applications are reviewed in the summer by a panel. And then they go to a November Council meeting. And those projects begin of January 1 of the following year. OK. I encourage everyone to review the recent grants. And that'll give you a really good sense of the range of what we fund. OK. And they can find that under our home page. Click on Grants and then Recent Grants. And then navigate to Museums. We listed it also as one of our featured resources for today. So if it's any of these people, you can click there. And I'll make sure that I post it with the recording, with the presentation, and one stop for everybody. OK, great. I want to mention our next two webinars. One next week is on Wednesday the 13th. It's on care of plastics. That's going to be with Christine Frohner, the conservator of contemporary art, modern materials, and media. And let's see here. I'm sorry, I think I've mangled that. But the second speaker on that will be Odile Madden, who's a research scientist at the Museum Conservation Institute at the Smithsonian Institution. And in July, we're having one webinar that's going to be on Tuesday, July 17th. Also at 1 o'clock Eastern. And Rachel Perkins-Erenstein is going to join us again. She's a conservator in private practice. And she presented one of these live chat webinars on data loggers in the past. This one will be specifically about wireless one. So I want to thank all of our participants for joining us today. And for all your questions. And Wendy, thank you so much for joining us and for the presentation. Thank you. It was my pleasure. Oh, great. Thanks. Susan, thank you. Thanks, Nancy. OK, everyone. Have a wonderful afternoon. Thanks so much.