Earlier this week the National Endowment for the Humanities made it possible through their site to search all NEH grants awarded since 1980.
This is a big help for anyone wondering . . .
- Does the NEH fund projects like the one we have?
- Is our project (or organization) too big/small?
- What does a funded grant application look like?
The first two questions can easily be answered through this new tool; there’s no access to the full text of the awards at this point, though individual awards are available via e-mail. (Note that a few examples of narratives for Humanities Collections and Reference Resources are available here, under “Program Resources–Sample Narratives” on the right, half-way down the page. For example, here’s the narrative from an application from the Newberry Library.)
Searching the database is straightforward. Looking for any grant going to any historical society anywhere in the country, I entered historical society in the “Organization Name” field, left the other fields blank, and got back 862 results, including this one:
NEH funded projects search result example: Shelton Historical Society
Because the results are returned on one page, you can quickly skim or search them using your browser’s search function. (Most browsers have page search built in.) This is an improvement over the way in which most sites display search results, broken up into short pages, making them impossible to quickly scan or search.
You can easily modify your search using one or more criteria. For example, selecting the state of Massachusetts and running a search on organizations that include the words historical society in their name returns 59 results.
Brett Bobley, CIO of the Office of Digital Humanities at the NEH, and his team have a done a great job introducing this, their 1.0 version of the search. They have plans for further improvements and are interested in your feedback. If you use the database search and have suggestions, you’ll find a link for feedback to the CIO near the bottom of the FAQ/Help page. And unlike the way this most large organizations–public or private–would handle this, your message really will go to the CIO–and he’ll read it.
…
Note: Another Federal agency, The Institute of Museum and Library Services, recently made the full text of the last two years of awarded Connecting to Collections Planning Grants available online.
