Common Heritage 2017 Guidelines and Applicant Webinar
A volunteer assists a community member in digitizing a photograph.
Photo by Bri Luginbill.
A volunteer assists a community member in digitizing a photograph.
Photo by Bri Luginbill.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced the final competition for the “Common Heritage” program. Awards in this program will bring to light historical records and artifacts currently hidden in family attics and basements across the country and make them digitally available to the wider public and for the public good.
Attendees at a public exhibit discuss historic agricultural photographs on display.
Photo courtesy Kutsche Center for Local History, Grand Valley State University.
Attendees at a public exhibit discuss historic agricultural photographs on display.
Photo courtesy Kutsche Center for Local History, Grand Valley State University.
NEH invites historical societies, libraries, archives, museums, colleges and other local institutions to apply for the Common Heritage grant program. Grants will support day-long events, organized by community cultural institutions, in which members of the public will be invited to share materials important to their family or community histories, such as photographs, artifacts, family letters, and works of art.
These items will be digitized, along with descriptive information and context provided by the community attendees. With the owner’s permission, digitized materials will be made publicly available through the institution’s online collections. Contributors will receive a free digital copy of their items to take home, along with the original materials.
Volunteer “digital ambassadors” and attendees at Minot State University’s History Scan Day.
Photo courtesy Bethany Andreasen.
Volunteer “digital ambassadors” and attendees at Minot State University’s History Scan Day.
Photo courtesy Bethany Andreasen.
Grants are being used for outreach activities – including lectures, exhibits, discussion programs, and film screenings – that celebrate and expand knowledge of the community’s past and its members.
The Common Heritage program was part of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ agency-wide initiative The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, which sought to demonstrate and enhance the role and significance of the humanities and humanities scholarship in public life.
A volunteer assists a community member in filling out permission forms at a digitization day sponsored by the Kutsche Center for Local History in Hart, Michigan in July 2016.
Photo by Bri Luginbill.
A volunteer assists a community member in filling out permission forms at a digitization day sponsored by the Kutsche Center for Local History in Hart, Michigan in July 2016.
Photo by Bri Luginbill.
NEH’s Common Heritage program awarded grants of up to $12,000 to community cultural organizations to coordinate community events and ensure that a wide range of historical materials can be digitized and contextualized through public programming.
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