 And I am going to turn this over right away to Elsa Huxley and let Elsa do the formal introductions. Elsa? Okay. Thanks so much, Susan. Good afternoon, everybody. We're so glad you're joining us today. I'm going to make a brief introduction to the community and the webinar, and then we'll get started. 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 Time. 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 Connecting to Collections initiative, including the bookshelf, the raising of our workshops and webinars, and links to these resources are filed under the topics menu on the site, and we'll also file a recording of today's webinar there. About twice a month, the Connecting to Collections 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 webpage at connectingtocollections.org. So today, I'm very pleased to welcome Elizabeth Joffrian, who's Senior Program Officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities in the Division of Preservation and Access. I'll just say a few words about Elizabeth, and then we'll get started. Prior to joining NEH in 2006, she was the head archivist at the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies at Western Washington University and an affiliated faculty in its graduate program in archives and record management. She is currently an adjunct faculty member at Catholic University where she teaches courses on archives and special collections. She has held previous positions at the Smithsonian Institution, including the National Portrait Gallery and the Archives of American Arts. She's also held professional archival positions at the North Carolina State Archives and the Historic New Orleans Collection. She received an MA in history from the University of New Orleans and an MLIS from the University of Maryland. She currently coordinates the Preservation Assistant Grants Program for NEH, and we're so grateful that you're joining us today, Elizabeth. Thank you, Elsa, and greetings to all of you, and thank you so much for joining me in a discussion of the funding opportunities offered by the National Endowment for the Humanities. As most of you know, the Endowment has provided long-standing support for the nation's cultural heritage institutions, and it really is a pleasure to be here to be able to discuss a little bit about how NEH might assist your organization in the preservation of your collections. As you'll see from the—let me put through a couple of these slides here. Here, I'll pull up my presentation. We'll get through a couple of things here. And there we go. Great. Thanks, Elsa. Sure. As you can see from the agenda I have here, I plan to provide a very brief introduction to NEH and the programs we support. But today's webinar is going to focus specifically on just one of our grant opportunities, and that's our Preservation Assistance Grants for smaller institutions known affectionately as PAG throughout the NEH and beyond, and I'll certainly refer to it by its acronym in the course of our discussions today. Now, we're going to conclude our session with a few tips for preparing a competitive grant application I think most of you will probably hear to learn a little bit about. And I envision this last piece really to be driven by your questions, so be sure to have a few in mind for me and we'll return to them towards the end of our session. In the process, I also hope to learn from you. I'm interested in the nature of your institutions, your preservation priorities, and how the PAG program has or can address your preservation needs. So let's begin by getting a sense of who's in the audience today. I want to start with just a quick poll to determine the nature and size of your institutions, and later I'll be asking a few questions about your preservation priorities as well as your experience in grant writing. But also, if we could bring up that first set of poll questions. Sure. And so there are two questions here. One is your type of institution and the other will come up shortly and it will be the size of your institution. And is there any way that I can get back to the slide? Not while we're running the poll. Okay. Well, I'll allow you to answer. I'll provide a little bit of context. The National Endowment for the Humanities supports a number of divisions that award grants to a range of nonprofit cultural institutions, including museums, archives, libraries, colleges and universities, public radio and television stations, and even in some cases, individual scholars for the purpose of education, research, and public programming in the humanities. And I'll bring up in just a second a slide that shows you all of those divisions that we have in the endowment. And we can talk a little bit about some of the kinds of activities that we support there. Okay. It looks like people are finished entering their answers. So we've got 45% from a museum and 13% from public libraries. And the institutional budgets by a great majority are under $250,000. Right. Well, that's fairly typical of what we see in the grant program and kind of what I expected to be here today, the ponderance of museums, libraries, and lower budgets. So it sounds like we've got the right audience for the presentation I'm going to do today. Great. I'll pull these away. Great. So this slide should give you a sense of the scope of NEH's programs and the kinds of activities we support, ranging from research fellowships to support for documentaries, film, and exhibitions to the cataloging and digitization of collections. And again, here's a list of all of NEH's funding divisions, including the Division of Preservation and Access, and that's the part of the endowment that I represent. Now, the Division of Preservation and Access supports many different kinds of funding opportunities, specific to collections care, and you can find out more information about all of NEH's grant programs at our website at www.neh.gov. And I've also provided an email address here as well. And I've also provided a good bit of information about our programs and the link handouts available on the webinar site. Now, this slide should give you a sense of the variety of different kinds of programs supported specifically by the Division of Preservation and Access. And unfortunately, we just don't have enough time for me to go into any detail on these grant programs in the course of our discussion today. But at the end, I'd be more than happy to bring this slide back up again and we can talk about any of the programs that you might have questions about. So for now, what I'll do is just give you a real quick overview of some of the typical activities that we fund in the Division of Preservation and Access. And you'll see that essentially we support projects designed to extend the life of cultural collections and make them more widely accessible. The first ones listed include activities or some of the activities funded specifically by PAG, so it'll give you a preview of some of the things that we're going to talk about today. We also fund a wide range of different kinds of collections and formats, and I hope this list is also reflective of some of the kinds of materials that you have in your own institutional repositories. So I think what I'd like to do before I get into some facts about the Preservation Assistance Grant Program is to get a sense of some of the resources that you feel are most at risk in your collections. And if you have priorities that aren't reflected in the list that Elsa's going to bring up from our second polling question, maybe materials like born digital or perhaps specific audio-visual formats, we have the possibility of having a text box down here and feel free to go ahead and add anything that's not on this list. And what I'm trying to do is get a sense here of some of your priorities and get a sense of how well the grant program is addressing those preservation needs. That'll be very important input for me as well. Okay, looks like it's shaping out a lot of paper, books, journals, archives and manuscripts. I think the one that's jumping out for me is Furniture Textiles and Historical Objects. We typically see an emphasis on photographs and moving images, but I think this is reflective of some of the museums that we have in the audience as well. Okay, and then we have some more detail. Historical City Records, Microfilm. Great. So a full range of different kinds of resources and you'll find that we'll have ways to address some of that in some of the programs that we hear or activities that we support in PAG. Thank you, Elsa. Now what I want to do here is to provide a little bit of background on the preservation assistance grant program and the kinds of activities that it supports. And I'll begin by addressing one of the most common misperceptions about NEH and that's that we fund only large well-established institutions. In fact, the Division of Preservation and Access launched its PAG program in 2000 to enhance the capacity of small and mid-sized institutions to preserve their collections and to reach out to organizations that don't typically apply to PAG or to NEH. And in fact, the program is directed in large part of institutions that often aren't able to compete effectively in our larger, more competitive grant program. And we especially encourage institutions that have never before applied to NEH to apply to this program. So in support of institutions like yours, preservation assistance grants provide up to $6,000 to help cultural repositories, libraries, museums, historical societies, historic sites, art and cultural organizations, town and county records offices to better preserve their collections. We strive to ensure that these applications are easy to write. We asked for just five-page narratives, so very short narratives compared to many other grant programs. And your institution isn't required to contribute any cost share to apply or any matching funds. The guidelines are online at www.neh.gov and you'll see a tab there that says apply for a grant and there's a listing by activity and alphabetically of all of the grant programs offered by NEH there. And the next deadline is on May 1st, 2012, so plenty of time to prepare an application ahead of that deadline. So as you can imagine, the potential audience for preservation assistance grants is huge. And in fact, this is our largest grant program in the division and one of the largest in the endowment overall based on the number of applications that we received. And based on your responses to the first question, I see many of the types of institutions that we support in this audience. And we'll kind of compare what we just did a moment ago with funding by institution type of PAC over the last several years. And you'll see, not surprisingly, that about two-thirds of all preservation assistance grants went to museums and libraries as reflected in this audience. So just quickly, I'll give you a few additional facts about the history of PAC funding and maybe give you a sense of the impact of the program to date. From 2000 to 2012, the divisions received a little bit over 3,000 PAC applications requesting over $16 million in funding. We've awarded nearly 1,600 PACs for a total of $7.5 million, and PACs have been made to every state as well as the District of Columbia and several of the U.S. territories. And in most years, we're able to fund about 40 to 50% of the applications we receive, and this is much higher than most of our other grant programs that tend to weigh in at about the 14 to 15% funding ratio. And on this slide, you'll get a sense of the breakdown in number of applications by year with a comparison to the number of awards each year in the dark blue there, so you'll see. And most years, that 40 to 50% ratio represented. So let's get to the heart of our webinar and take a look at the kinds of activities that a preservation assistance grant will support. Probably the most common application to the PAC program is for the hire of an outside consultant to conduct a general preservation assessment and to assist in drafting a long-range plan for the care of collections. This is typically considered to be the very first step in developing a preservation plan, and it can lay the groundwork for identifying strategic priorities and planning for future fundraising efforts. It turns out it's going to be a really informative document for your stakeholders and resource allocators, and it helps you make the case for the importance of your preservation needs and priorities to those folks that carry the power of the purse. Now, a typical preservation site survey would address building and environmental concerns. It would review the overall condition of collections. It would evaluate policies and procedures as they apply to preservation and provide recommendations for improving storage and handling practices. For example, a few years back, NEH made an award to the Atlanta Fulton Library System to hire a preservation specialist to assess a collection that documents the life of writer Margaret Mitchell, known, famous for Gone with the Wind. As is typically the case, the consultant visited the institution to evaluate procedures and conditions affecting collections' preservation and prepared a report that summarized their funding and prioritized those recommendations. The library then used the report to plan for future preservation efforts and successfully returned to NEH with a second PAC application to address those priorities, and that included the purchase of shelving, storage equipment and supplies, environmental monitoring equipment, a security camera, and even staff training and collections care. And I think this is a good example to begin with because it gives you a sense of a full range of the different kinds of PAC or activities that a preservation assistance grant will support, and we'll drill down a little bit more on that in terms of future discussion. So just to do another polling question very quickly, I'm curious, how many of you have received a general preservation assessment of your collections and facilities, and how is that funded? And again, this information will be very useful to us because we, I think, operate still under the assumption that there are a lot of smaller institutions out there that haven't had that general assessment yet, and it's so important in terms of launching on that first step to a preservation plan. Well, it looks like it's coming to fruition here in some of the statistics we're getting. So again, it seems like you're in the right webinar. For those of you who haven't taken this step, I really encourage you to apply to a preservation assistance grant or to other funding sources such as the CAP program, that's the Conservation Assessment Program, administered by Heritage Preservation and Cooperation with IMLS or other sources that provide funding and support for preservation assessments. So it looks like a good half of you still need that assessment, so thanks for that input. That's good to know. Ready for me to pull it away? Yes, thanks. Now, as I mentioned, that initial preservation assessment would typically result in a detailed report with prioritized recommendations, and applicants can return to NEH for support for activities that might include a range of specialized studies and plans, such as establishing environmental monitoring programs or developing more detailed plans for improving environmental conditions or planning for lighting systems or security or fire protection for collections. Or to develop and implement a plan for better storage of collections, such as these baskets and oversized archival materials. Or for instituting an integrated pest management program, such as an award we recently made to the South Street Seaport Museum in Lower Manhattan, depicted on the left-hand of your slide here. Or for assessing the conservation treatment needs of a selected item or items in a collection. For example, I believe it was last year we made an award to Washington University's Kemple Art Museum for the hire of a specialist to conduct a conservation assessment of ancient Greek ceramics dating from the sixth century B.C. And also to Mr. Kyrgyz, a small liberal art school in Minnesota, has received several PAC awards from us over the years, including one that supported a specialized assessment of their audio-visual collections based on the recommendations of their first PAC. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we've seen many applications for assistance in developing the resources and skills needed to cope with disasters and a PAC can assist in developing a plan for disaster and emergency response. And in fact, we often find that this is one of the high-priority recommendations in most general assessments, so probably not too surprisingly. PAC also supports the purchase of preservation supplies, such as cabinets and shelving units, storage containers, boxes and folders, or environmental monitoring equipment. And applicants may also request support to send staff members to workshops and training courses that focus on the preservation of collections, or to hire a consultant to do on-site training for your staff and volunteers. We're aware at any age that many smaller institutions operate with little or no professional preservation expertise, and these training efforts can assist you in acquiring the necessary skills, such as popper methods and materials for the care of collections, digital preservation and disaster preparedness and response. In some instances, these training efforts involve collaborations among several organizations in a particular community. For example, after obtaining their first preservation assessment, the Central Library System received a second award for training in disaster preparedness and emergency response for staff in five cultural institutions located in the Mississippi Delta region. As most of you know, prone to flooding and tornadoes, but as some of you may not know, also to earthquakes. So it's really good to see these institutions begin to think collaboratively about how to deal with emergency response. The organizations involved, in addition to the Sunflow Library, were the BB King Museum, Delta State University Archives Museum on their campus there, the Cottonlandia Museum, and the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, which for you blues fans, are famous for being home of the crossroads. Now, a few years ago, we expanded the kind of training that PAG supports. We recognize that smaller and mid-sized institutions are under a great deal of pressure to digitize their collections, and PAG now supports education and training and digital best practices to care and preservation of digital resources as well as cataloging and arrangement description of collections. And keep in mind, I'm talking about training here. PAG has also supported numerous digital preservation assessments, including recent awards to Valdosta College and to SUNY Albany for a survey of their digital collections and the development of digital preservation policies and procedures. And we'd really like to see more applications like that for digital assessments. It's something that we're really promoting in the program. So if you feel that that's something that would be useful for you, keep that in mind. We've also supported training and education in best practices and standards for digital preservation, including awards to Brigham Young University for a collaborative workshop attended by 16 different institutions in Utah, and to Mills College Art Museum for two workshops on best practices and standards and sustaining digital collections and the proper care and handling of artwork undergoing digitization. And I understand anecdotally that Mills just recently received an IMLS grant to digitize their collections, so there was a bit of a build in there. Now, keep in mind, we're not able to support the development of digital management systems that the labor associated with digitization are cataloging through PAG. We have other grant programs for that in the division, but PAG does support assessments and education and training in these areas. And for many smaller institutions, it provides the groundwork needed to get started with sustainable digital programs. So to recap some of the activities we fund in PAG, again, these are small grants, up to $6,000, easy to write, just five pages, no cost share, and the next deadline, again, is going to be May 1, 2012. And what I'd like to do at this point is maybe our last polling question. And I'd like to get some feedback from you that'll give me a good sense of your needs and how we're meeting them in this grant program. And I'll have to bring up a polling question that essentially recaps the information on this slide. And I'm wondering which of any of these activities are priorities for your institution? If your priorities in terms of your preservation concerns aren't reflected here, actually it was question number, we'll do this one and then we'll go back to the other one. It was question number four. But this is good information too. Give my voice a break as well. All right. No, let's go ahead and let them do this because they'll feed in together. And the other question we'll focus essentially on within the kinds of activities that PAG supports, areas that you feel are priorities for your institution. And I'm really quite interested in if there are priorities that you feel in terms of preservation that aren't reflected in the list that we'll bring up shortly, if you can let me know what those are. And we're always, you know, seeking information from the field that helps us get a better sense of what's needed in terms of preservation planning and preparedness. So I see a lot of folks have not applied at all for grant finding and its preponderance of this group. At some point maybe towards the end of the session we can talk a little bit about those of you who applied for grants that weren't unsuccessful, perhaps one of the obstacles that you felt in terms of seeking grant funding. It looks like we've got that framed out. And Elsa, if you wouldn't mind bringing up the fourth question. 57% was a little higher than I expected. But again, I think it just reiterates that perhaps this will be good information for you. This is another multiple answer question. So again, this would be your priorities in terms of preservation for your institution. And for those of you, I don't see any other answers yet, but if there are things that, again, we don't have listed here, I would love to go back and discuss what you feel your needs are in a little bit more detail. That was at least one of you. I'm saving some of these questions too off to the side and we'll go back and address. I think that would be great. Yeah, towards the end we'll be able to go back and address in more detail some of these answers. So 75 of you feel, I think, that storage is a priority. And we certainly do see a lot of applications in that area, particularly from museums libraries. Individuals who are dealing with special collections, archival collections. Thank you. Again, this is very useful information to me. We will certainly fold it into our own planning and thinking about the grant program. So like I said, this webinar is working both ways. I really appreciate the input. Should I put this one aside now? Yeah, let's go ahead and we'll come back to some of this towards the end. So what I'd like to do now is talk about what it takes to write a competitive grant proposal to NEH. I think some of the information that you're all probably focusing in and hoping to get today. And I'd like to begin with a few basic themes that underscore all funding opportunities at NEH and then we'll shift our focus to specific tips for writing a competitive application to the preservation assistance grants for smaller institutions program. The most basic requirement is that all activities must be grounded in the humanities and all applicants to NEH have to make the case for the significance of their project to the humanities. And that's a way that NEH, I think, differs from some of the other federal and even state level granting programs. For the purpose of TAG, that means that applicants must make the case for the value of their collections that are the focus of the project. And I repeat, focus of the project, not your collections at large and your institution. And the significance particularly for public programming, education and research. I'll talk a little bit more about how to do this well in a moment in terms of TAG. Another common theme at NEH is peer review and sort of how that evaluation process works, what I want to talk about here. After the grant deadline, we organize applications into panels usually by humanities discipline, but for TAG, it's typically by institutional type or format. So collections dealing with moving images or photographs or applications that come from applications that are historic sites or archives or something along those lines. We then recruit panelists with relevant subject and methodology expertise. And for most programs, the panels need in Washington, D.C., and we have a full day discussion about the applications, but for preservation assistance grants, do the volume of applications. All of the reviews are done entirely online. Now after the panel submits their ratings, NEH staff reviews the evaluations and makes recommendations to the NEH National Council. They are then presently appointed advisory board. And then they in turn make their recommendations to the National Chairman, I mean to the NEH Chairman who's authorized to make grants. So that should give you a sense that we often get asked, you know, why does it take so long between the deadline and the time that we're able to make an announcement about successful applications? And it's because it goes through a sort of multi-phase peer review process. It takes several months. Now the final thing I want to talk about is the assistance that we can offer you. I encourage you to contact us by phone or email to discuss your projects. We can confirm eligibility and we can provide some tips to you. For most of our grant programs, we read drafts for a pad, again, through the volume of applications we receive. We're not able to do that. But our guidelines do include sample narratives from successful applicants and it will give you a sense of what a good application looks like and why we evaluators thought it was particularly a strong application. Now if you're applying your turn down or if you're successful, we also provide the evaluator's comments so you can get a sense of what they thought and what their opinions were about your project based on their ratings. The last thing I want to mention is it relates to submission of applications. All applications to NEH must be submitted electronically through Grants.gov and that's a government-wide portal that most federal granting agencies use and it provides a good bit of help information, a tutorial, and a checklist that is available on their website. You can also link to these through the guidelines at NEH and it will help you get registered and help you navigate the system for submitting your application. And I just want to emphasize one thing. The registration for Grants.gov is multi-phase. You have to go through several steps to do that. So we recommend that applicants, potential applicants, get registered with Grants.gov at least a month before a grant deadline. So make sure if you haven't, if you're preying on applying for a tag and you haven't registered yet, now it's going to be a good time to just go ahead and get started with that. Now what I want to talk about at this point is just a little bit about what it takes to write a good narrative and we'll get sort of the nitty-gritty of that process. So begin to take good notes. These are the secrets. As I mentioned the guidelines are online and it includes specific questions that we ask applicants to address. We provide a lot of direction in how to respond to these questions so a lot of suggestions and examples of what kinds of information we want in association with the questions that we ask in the guidelines. So be sure to follow the guidelines, answer all the questions and what I'll do now is just go over briefly each of these questions and give you some tips and pointers on how to grapple with them well. The first question that we ask is, what activity or activities would the grant support? And this is basically your case statement. We're asking what is the nature of your project, why is it important and how does it relate to broader preservation efforts in your institution? Another question that we ask is, where are the content and slides of your humanities collections that are the focus of the project? And here your description should be at least one page long so that's one of the five pages of your narrative. So give you a sense of the importance here. It should emphasize the humanity significance of your collections, any treasures or highlights perhaps, the extent and condition of your collections and provide a clear discussion of how the collections support humanity's themes and for PAD that's typically in American history and culture but can certainly be broader than that. We also ask how are these humanities collections used? Here we expect you to provide examples of how the collections are or can be used by students, scholars, genealogists, and others in the general public. And this might be in an exhibit or it might be in supportive educational programs or classroom instructional materials or it might be for research in a range of different kinds of subjects including how your collections might contribute to new scholarly interpretations. Now I want to emphasize that these two sections on use and content are really the most important part of your application. Our applicants as you can imagine, based on some of the polling questions and the information I've given you so far, typically apply for very similar activities purchase of store supplies, preservation assessments, that sort of thing. So the case for humanity significance that's going to distinguish your application from the 250 to 350 others that we receive in each grant cycle. Another question that we ask is, what is the nature and mission of your institution? We'll ask you to describe your mission and your institutional commitment to making your collections accessible to the public. Now keep in mind that only collections that are open and accessible to the public are eligible for PAG. And we'll get you to answer that question by asking you how many days of the week you're open to the public, your institutional capacity to support access and use of your collections, and the availability of staff for that purpose. And we'll also ask you to discuss specific budget or staffing considerations that characterize your organization as a smaller mid-size institution, which brings us to really the most commonly asked question about PAG and I think I probably answer this question every time I pick up the phone to counsel someone on a PAG application. And that question is, how do I know if I'm small? And it's a good question. We're aware that many departments or many small departments in larger institutions are responsible for collections of care and as such we don't have an institutional funding cutoff or a cutoff based on the size of your budget, but libraries, archives or museums that are part of a larger organization, maybe a college or university for example, should provide budget information to the institutional unit or department. And that's a way to help you distinguish yourself as small. I mean often it is the university museums or special collections that actually have a much smaller budget and an institution that has a much higher funding ratio comparatively. And also keep in mind when all things being equal we will give preference to the institutions that have the smaller budget. So keep in mind that it's important a bit of information to answer in the grant application. Another question that we ask is, has your institution ever had a preservation or conservation assessment? And here we want you to discuss the results obviously and how it informed your project and how your project as proposed is going to build on the recommendations of that assessment. We also ask what is the importance of the project to your institution? We want you to discuss how the project fits into your institution's overall preservation priorities, including any prior planning for the project or perhaps the level of urgency and its preservation needs. We also ask for the names and qualifications of your consultants and the staff involved in the project. I just want to emphasize here that having the right staffing and consultants is really critical to the competitiveness of your application. For example, don't bring in a textile conservator to conduct an archival assessment or perhaps a paper conservator to look at your textiles. In many cases you may have worked with a conservator in the past. You know that person, that's great, but make sure their expertise is appropriate to the project at hand. And finally, the last thing that we ask for in the narrative is a plan of work for the project. And here we want you to outline the steps of the project, the sequence in which they'll occur and indicate the staff responsible for each activity. And be sure that if you're requesting supplies and equipment that they're well-described and meet preservation standards, that any workshops are appropriate to your organization's preservation needs and that again your staff and consultants have the right experience. One of the things that will be included in your application is obviously a budget. We asked for an itemized budget showing your project's expenses and to help with this we provide a sample template in the guidelines that will show you sort of how to set that up. And keep in mind that each expense listed in your budget must be explained somehow in the narrative and in your work plan. And then finally we get a good bit of supporting documentation in our applications that go beyond that five-page narrative. If you've had that prior assessment and executive summary, again, how your project builds on those recommendations, vendor estimates for supplies or equipment including quantity and cost, workshop descriptions. If you're hiring a consultant, keep in mind that a letter of commitment from that consultant is absolutely mandatory and the letter should indicate buy-in or commitment on the part of that consultant. And their letters should track or document the activities that are described in the narrative. So we want something beyond, yes, I intend to be there in the month of June. We want to make sure that the activities that they have in mind correspond to what you've written in your narrative. And then finally, brief resumes for staff and letters of support. Typically letters of support are from scholars underscoring that humanity is significant of your collection or perhaps support from prior consultants that know your collection. Now here's the evaluation criteria that we ask our reviewers to address. And you'll see that they're basically evaluating how well you've answered the questions and discovered real emphasis on humanity's significance here including the content of the collections and their use. And we also ask our evaluators to assess the level of accessibility of your collection. So some of the things that I talked about earlier in terms of how many days you're open to the public and availability of staff to provide access to collections. We also have them look at the feasibility of the proposed activities and how they'll contribute to your institutional capacity to preserve your collection, as much as possible, and then the adequacy of your plan of work, staffing, and budget. Now, I don't want to dwell on the negatives here, but I just want to mention there are several activities that PAC won't fund. And we have those listed and itemized in our guidelines. And I would encourage you as you're drafting your narrative to be familiar with that list and eligible activities. We have to render that application ineligible. And we hate to do that. We don't want to send out that letter so if you have any questions about the eligibility of your activities that you're planning for your proposal again, don't hesitate to give us a call and we can certainly talk through that with you. And I'll just close with a few final tips through summarizing some of the points I've already made. Be sure to follow the guidelines and answer all the questions that I just went through and answer them fully. Remember the importance of humanity's significance for any kind of application submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities. Give us a call. Talk with us about your projects. Review the sample proposals and FAQs that we have with the guidelines. And if you're turned down, request those comments and consider reapplying. So at this point, I think what I'd like to do is shift gears and turn the tables a bit and open this up to your questions. I noticed there's been several that have popped up on the side screen and I think Kristen and Elsa will help me focus in on a few of those and get some of those answered. And we can certainly talk about your needs and how they might be met by Pag. We can return to prior slides. I can provide advice for particular projects as well. So I'll turn it over to you. That's great, Elizabeth. Thank you so much. Great. I have been pulling over some questions and I'm not going to go quite in order here, but the question I thought maybe we could start with from Su Chen in New York. And I'll just redo the question first. She said, would it be possible to apply from multiple grants for different collections? For instance, our institution manages multiple small archives. And then there was a follow-up question from Piper Pereter in Tallahassee saying, Ditto, and would the managing organization apply or should the application come from one of the smaller entities that are being managed? I think this is a little bit different from the slide you showed us that was talking about the size of the institution, like if an archive was part of a university, but could you say something about this? Yeah, I'll answer both questions in turn. And first of all, we often receive multiple applications from an institution. Now, if you're applying in a particular grant cycle, you'll want to, unless, let me try to phrase this carefully, if you're applying from a large institution, a large statewide university, for example, and you're coming to us from very different departments, perhaps it's the special collections in a library on campus and perhaps there's an unaffiliated museum on the other side of campus, it's perfectly fine to submit two applications to us, but the same entity, the same special collections unit shouldn't apply in the same grant cycle. But having said that, we often see applicants come to us in multiple years. So perhaps beginning with that first preservation assessment, you get the recommendations, you determine that storage is your priority, you come back to us in the next year, requesting funding for storage, upgrades, shelving units, that sort of thing. And then maybe your next priority is planning for disaster preparedness or some specialized training for staff and come back in an additional year. Sometimes you can combine activities. If you can do this within a small amount that's allocated for the grant, you can combine different activities within one application as well. Now, in terms of which unit should apply, that's going to be answered to some degree by your grants development office and the Grants.gov system that I mentioned earlier. Grants.gov will ask for registration unit for your organization, and often that's going to be the broader, perhaps university-wide or library system-wide unit, and that's registered with Grants.gov. And you'll have some institutional limitations on that process. Your folks there will tell you, you know we're already registered and you need to apply through us. But it's very clear to us, you know, when you begin to write that case statement and some other things that I talked about, that it's an individual unit within that larger organization that is applying for the specific funding. So the answer, I guess, in some ways varies from institution to institution, but typically, based on the nature of Grants.gov, it's going to be the larger entity. Okay. I'm going to move a little bit further back now. Kathy Gao in Hatfield, Massachusetts said, Elizabeth, we are just starting the inventory of our collection. Is there a period to apply for a general preservation assessment now, or would we need to wait until our inventory is complete several years parenthetically, hopefully, down the road? Well, I think the answer to that is I think there's no problem with applying for a preservation assessment at this point. You would need to have enough intellectual control over the collection to be able to give us a cohesive description in terms of humanity's significance. So if you don't know what you have yet, then it's going to be hard to make that case. But if you've got a strong enough sense of what you have and you're able to answer the questions that I described earlier, you know, some highlights and treasures, the kind of scholarly research that could be done in the collection, that kind of thing, then you're probably ready in a preservation assessment at this point might be useful to you. You'll be able to identify some priorities, but you'll need to have enough intellectual control over it to be able to describe the collections at large and to get evaluators a sense of the humanity's significance of the materials. So it depends on the answer again, once again, but you'll know at the institutional level when you're ready to make that case. Okay. Is the deadline always May 1st? No, it's usually based on, you know, sometimes May 1st might be on a Sunday or something along those lines. So we aim for not having a deadline on a Friday or Monday and usually it'll be as close to the first of the month as we can get it. I think it was on the 3rd last year. It just happened to fall on the 1st this year. Okay. But at the beginning of May, typically. Okay. Levan Williams in Memphis, Tennessee, had said there his institution will be undertaking a preservation assessment in April and won't be prepared for this deadline, but when's the following once? I think that probably covers that question. If we didn't, then please write back in. Right, and I would say, you know, that the cap grant that does something similar, it's not just in the fall. She's not on the audio right now, but yeah, yes. I can find out when it is exactly. I think Christian will write in. So we often get that second tier kind of application to implement recommendations from an assessment that perhaps it was a conservation assessment program sponsored the initial assessment and then, you know, it's perfectly feasible to come back into TAG to address some of those recommendations that have been funded through that process as well. Okay. We have a couple of questions about specifics of eligibility. Katherine Wright from Forney, Texas wrote, we are a very small museum and currently I am the only paid employee, but I'm only paid for 30 hours a week, although I work about 35. Do you have to have one full-time employee to apply for this grant? Yeah, we ask for sort of one full-time equivalent and so it's perfectly acceptable. We know that we're aiming for smaller institutions that are often very minimally staffed and so you can cobble together three or four volunteers, you know, maybe a couple of part-time folks and mostly what we're trying to get at is that you have enough staffing to reasonably make your collections available to the public so that you have access so that they have access to them. So if it's something along the lines that we have one volunteer who, you know, will show up on appointment and maybe that's not quite the equivalent, but if you've got several volunteers and a couple of part-time staff then you can cobble that together and make it the equivalent. Okay. Kathy Gao had another question sort of along those lines. She said, one reason we haven't applied in the past was the need to meet the eligibility requirements of being open a set number of days. Now the guidelines seem a little more flexible, is that true? Yes, I'm glad she noticed that. We changed the guidelines this year and we were aware I think that 120 days were while an important sort of bar for accessibility of collections. In some of the instances we were getting, institutions that have intentions to make their collections available very soon and even in some cases, the kind of activities associated with the preservation assistance proposal, our application is, you know, contingent on that accessibility. So we decided to pull back on giving a specific number of days where institutions have to be open and we're going to have our evaluators assess accessibility as part of their evaluation criteria. So we're not going to have a set date. We just want you to convince our evaluators that you're committed to making your collections available to the public and that they are accessible. And again, I have to emphasize that your collections must be accessible as part of to be eligible for tag. The staff question we had about cobbling together, Martha in Omaha asked, how qualified does staff have to be? How do we find an archival work we're having to train ourselves? That's pretty typically the case with many institutions that apply to the preservation assistance grant. It depends on the nature of your project. But in most cases, one of the things that we do with the Pag grant is to help you get the training for your staff and volunteers that you need. So if you can identify where that need is, you can certainly come into Pag and get additional training. We see that if we're providing, for example, rehousing supplies, that you're going to have staff that understands how to do that, what's needed to to rehouse those materials successfully. If you're applying for environmental monitoring equipment, we want to be sure that you have staff that's going to be able to use it and compile that data in reasonable ways. We don't expect that you have that in place. But if you don't have it in place, you might want to combine with some training opportunities supported through Pag. And again, if you can do that for $6,000 and often what our applicants are able to do that, we would encourage you to combine those two activities. Okay. Kristen waited and said the CAP deadline is actually on December 1st on the summer Sunday. So Elizabeth in Sioux Falls asks, is it better to wait until the CAP assessment is completed to apply for the Pag? We've never had a preservation assessment. You know, often folks are surprised. Maybe it's some of the prioritized recommendations that come out of those assessments. And while they're assuming a recommendation is going to be for storage or something, it turns out that they've got a pretty intense, you know, past or mold problem that they didn't anticipate. So sometimes it can be surprising and you can make a better case in your proposal if you're able to summarize the prioritized recommendations that came out of that assessment. So it's a good idea to go ahead and do that. Jack McCarthy in Philadelphia asked, is a qualified consultant report or assessment always required? In terms of applying for sort of a next phase. I think so. I mean, I think he was probably going off the bulleted list on the PowerPoint. So I guess what I'm trying to get at is the question, is it a qualified consultant where the emphasis is or whether it's the assessment? Gotcha. Yeah. Well, could you write in and say a little bit something else about that? In the meantime, Jenny Love had another question along those lines. Does that letter of commitment need to be signed or is an emailed copy sufficient? An emailed copy is fine. You know, just as long as it has that person's you know, signature at the bottom and a date and all of that, the information associated with the that it would be with email sufficient for us, it doesn't have to be a hand client. Hand client to copy. What's there is the letter of commitment from the consultant really needs to emphasize the kinds of things that you've identified in your plan of work. We sometimes get letters from consultants that just seem boilerplate or open-ended and they never do very well in evaluation because it doesn't seem that the consultant has really been involved or discussed the project at hand. So it comes off as a weaker application. It's very important that they identify some of the activities that you're planning to have them address. Jack has gotten back to us. In the meantime I just wanted to say we will be making this presentation available later in PDF format. Now Jack said the emphasis was on qualified consultants. Yeah, I mean it's very important that you get a qualified consultant and we don't provide lists of individuals to pull on but there are a lot of resources out there to find consultants. The institutions bringing in preservation professionals from their local university, the regional field services all have individuals to do these consultations. The professional organizations in conservation and preservation all have individuals that can help you either find a consultant or can do the consultations themselves. But yeah, we'll ask that you include a resume for your consultant a level of expertise associated with the kinds of objects or formats that they'll be serving. In a second I'll also post the URL for AIC site where you can find people. Alright, sorry for one second here. I'm just catching up with the questions because they're starting to come in quick. Let's see. Okay, we have a couple of questions about size. Martha asked a little bit earlier on. Let's see here, Martha Jackson and Raleigh. What is institutional size? Staff or budget or both? What is the maximum? Like I said earlier, we don't have a funding cutoff for this. We're aware that many large institutions have smaller departments that really can have very minimal funding that are responsible for collections of care. So it's not unusual that maybe a small campus museum is operating on a sheet string. And so we don't want to say or no aspect of your organization can be able to apply to PAD. We want to keep that flexible. So again, it's important that you submit the departmental budget that you have and not put your broader institutional budget and that's the information we're looking for. There is no cutoff in terms of the size of staff we see, or for the size of the budget, we see a wide range of answers to those questions. So I said earlier, all things being that we're trying to make recommendations for funding and we've got limited resources in terms of the amounts of money that we have for these awards will give preference or consideration to truly small institutions and institutions that have never applied to PAD before. But otherwise, there's no funding cutoff. Is the amount of funding available for this year comparable to that for other years and Dalton is asking? I did have an extra slide that I did include and Elsa, if you want to bring that, that was right after my contact information which I should have put up also. I'll pull that up in one second. Maybe I can go ahead and get to it. There we go. I thought I might get this question. So I'll give you a sense of now, our appropriation in 2011 was a little bit lower than the year before and then you saw a little bit of a decline in 2012. Right now, we're very much in the active phase in terms of what the 2013 budget is going to be. It still needs to go into discussion in the House and in the Senate and so we don't have any feedback at this point but the request that the President has made for this agency overall is $154 million, a little over $154 million which is up and puts us back on par with 2011 and you'll see a little over $15 million will go to the Decision of Preservation Access and then that funding will be provided up among all of the grant programs that we support in the division. So it'll give you a sense, I think, in terms of where we sit right now these are the other years. Now 2013, it's not over until House and the Senate come to an agreement and make an appropriation but you'll see right now where the request is. Okay. I'll go back to that contact slide and then let's look at Linda's question. Linda Endersby from Jefferson City says as a state agency we have to bid for consultant services and we can't do that until after the grant is awarded. Can we list the qualifications that would be part of the bid in the grant application rather than naming a specific consultant? Yeah, that's often an issue and what we'd like for you to do and we know it's tricky but what we'd like for you to do is to have a couple of folks in mind and have some commitment from them and you can just make it plain in your proposal that you're going to have to go through an RFP process and have some institutional requirements but what we need to know, what we're trying to avoid is that you get a grant and then you can't find a consultant. So what we'd like for you to do is get on that consultant's calendar more or less and have a commitment from them that if they're chosen in the RFP process and if for your institutional needs you need to offer a couple of different people that's fine for you. Just make it plain in your application that you have some institutional requirements around being able to identify a particular consultant. Our Stearns and Shreve Ports says, for a proposal requesting a preservation assessment would you recommend highlighting the importance of an archive's entire collection or highlighting a specific collection? You need to make the case for the collections that are going to be the focus of the project. So for an assessment, that tends to be pretty wide ranging. So what you should do is maybe a little bit of both. I mean, talk in terms of that describes the collection, your archival collection at large and then you may want to draw out some particular highlights, maybe some early diaries or whatever you feel of the particular treasures. Materials that perhaps have been used in exhibition frequently or often asked for by students using the collection or whatever the case might be. So provide good examples that illuminate some themes in terms of your collections at large. Okay. Linda Simmons-Henry in North Carolina is asking, does the grant cover hiring someone to process the collection? I'm not sure. Right. Yeah, thanks for asking that. We don't fund labor in preservation assistance grants. We have other grants that do that. Our Humanities Collections and Reference Resources typically is the grant program that funds arrangement and description of collections. The reason for that is it's just with $6,000, there's just not enough money to really support that in any meaningful way. But what we do in TAG is provide education and training in how to arrange and describe archival collections or catalog, museum objects and that sort of thing. So to give your staff the training that they need to learn how to do that. Judy Knight and Laramie asked a little while ago, I'd like to apply for disaster preparedness. Can we use PAC funds to pay first responders to come for a full on drill hearing for the purchase of fire extinguishers? I'd need to look at the proposal a little bit more carefully. There are certain kinds of things that we fund in TAG that sometimes sound a little odd. We do fund certainly disaster planning kits and you can often find those easily from a number of different kinds of vendors and that's often a request that we get with an application. It is good, I think, to bring in outside responders as part of an assessment and that sort of thing. But again, the focus of the kinds of activities in TAG is really on the collection so a little leaning towards the staffing and what I would do in that case is to encourage you to give me a call and we can talk a little bit about where you are to process the nature of your collections and your institutions and kind of hone down on a set of activities that would make the most sense for your institution. Okay. We only have a couple minutes left so I'm just trying to get to these. Anna in New York said, with the hiring of an architect to draw up plans we were funded by PAG for conservator and architect to draw up preliminary drawings for storage room and we are looking for the next step of more detailed architectural drawings of the building in order to continue to proceed forward. This would not be a bricks and mortar project. Right. Thanks for that question. The answer to that is we actually have another grant program that I think is a little bit more appropriate for that kind of activity and it's really going to depend in terms of that program for the heritage collections grant program and the goal of that grant program is actually to bring together teams of architects, engineers, preservation professionals, facilities folks and take a look holistically at facilities and storage and the nature of your collections and start to think about sustainable practices for storing and taking care of maintaining collections and so I'd be happy to talk with the person that submitted this question to the grant program. In some cases, where they are, where their needs are really more appropriate for preservation assistance grants and they need to take that step and get some groundwork in place before they're ready for that next step but if an institution is there and they're ready to start working with an architect then I think this is any cultural heritage collections grant program is a better fit for the kind of activities that they describe. I have a question from Alan Sullivan in Santa Fe. Do you think the collection is considered art? Is it safe to assume we should exclude those items from a proposed NEH funding request? Well, we consider art history as one of the humanities and so we often and have funded frequently conservation assessments of paintings, of sculpture, the Greek ceramics that I described in one of my examples. You just need to frame your case in terms of humanity significance in an art history sort of perspective. So the humanity themes are the history of art, the impact of the materials perhaps in exhibit in research and that kind of thing but no, it's not uncommon at all for us to deal with art museums in this grant program. We get a number of applications. For a general preservation assessment is it better to hire one consultant with broad expertise who can make recommendations of priorities or hire several experts in different areas, specific to I guess the materials there? And we see both and it depends on the complexity of your collections. I've seen many applications where there's a general preservation assessment that's going to be done by a person with sort of broad ranging expertise that's looking at the facilities in the collections at large but they know that their photographic materials or moving image materials are particularly at risk and they want a little bit more detailed assessment. So they bring in a team of two consultants, one that's going to focus and hone down on those specialized formats and with broader perspective. And then in some cases, it's appropriate to bring in that broader expertise. It just depends on where you feel your risks are and the nature of expertise required to address that. And again, that's something that we can help you with to give us a call and we can talk a little bit more about the nature of your collections and provide more specific advice. Anna has said, what number shall I use to contact you to follow up on my question? And Elizabeth very kindly has made out and I wanted to point that out. And I'd like to encourage everyone also to visit the Connecting to Collections.org website where we have general discussion boards. A lot of these questions I think are relevant to a number of people and if we can foster a conversation there it will be helpful to people beyond this. We have recorded this webinar and we'll be archiving it and making it available also on the website. And then let's see here. Okay, thanks so much. So I want to encourage everyone. I'm sure there are more questions to put them up there. We'll make the recording available and also this presentation available in PDF format. And, yes, Jerry in Vermont, if your question was not answered you may contact her directly. That information should be right up there on the screen. Yes, please do. Be happy to answer any questions. Well, Elizabeth, this has been certain very helpful to our participants and very interesting and I want to thank you for such information that I know people are going to find very useful in filling out their applications. And thank you all. It was a real pleasure to do this and thank you all for the input that you provided for us. It will be very useful as we think about the parameters of the grant program as well. They were great questions. Yes. All right, thank you very much everybody and I hope you have a wonderful afternoon. Thank you.