Division of Preservation and Access

A substantial portion of the nation’s cultural heritage and intellectual legacy is held in libraries, archives, and museums. These repositories are responsible for preserving and making available collections of books, serials, manuscripts, sound recordings, still and moving images, works of art, objects of material culture, and rapidly expanding digital collections. The challenge is great: to preserve diverse formats of materials that are threatened by factors inherent in their physical structures or by the environments in which they are housed, and to create a level of intellectual control sufficient to enable users to find and use the materials relevant to them. Increasingly, these humanities collections are being used to create the kind of Web-based resources that NEH supports, such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, descriptive catalogs, and digital archives. Both the creators and users of these resources also need our support to develop digital tools to enhance access to and promote integration of these materials.