Assignment #7: Conservation Funding Trends

As I reviewed the websites of a variety of funding agencies for this assignment, I was on the lookout for one trend in particular: collaboration. The 2008 AIC annual meeting, titled “Creative Collaborations,” highlighted collaborative efforts between conservation departments and a range of other institutions. Since many of these projects were grant-funded, I was interested to see which agencies specifically addressed collaboration as a funding priority.

The J. Paul Getty Foundation, a private agency "committed to advancing the understanding and preservation of the visual arts locally and throughout the world," addresses collaboration in their newly revised mission statement, stating that one of their funding priorities is to promote “the interdisciplinary practice of conservation.” The foundation is also making a shift towards targeted initiatives that are focused on a specific issue or region and are carried out in collaboration with other Getty programs.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a private grantmaking agency that focuses on long-term, comprehensive funding rather than smaller initiatives, offers grants in six core areas. Their Museums and Art Conservation program does not speak directly to supporting collaborative projects, but they do state that one of their goals is to help conservators “make their knowledge and professional expertise available to others in new as well as in more traditional ways” which, at the very least, hints at collaborative possibilities. Mellon's Research in Information Technology funding is for efforts that respond to emerging technologies and they way they relate to the foundation's traditional constituencies, including conservation:

“Institutions of higher education are encouraged to partner with for-profit vendors, including producers of instructional software companies, publishers, course management system manufacturers, and other sources of instructional technology, when such efforts are appropriate as an integral part of a larger deliverable."

They are also interested in technologies that can benefit multiple institutions and are sharable among institutions. This approach to funding reminds me of my earlier post in response to Katie Hafner's New York Times article about digitization efforts and challenges - we need to think creatively about possible partnerships for our work, in both the physical and digital realm.

In terms of federally funded grant programs, the National Endowment for the Humanities offers Preservation and Access grants for Humanities Collections and Resources (among many other categories). While guidelines for this particular grant program, which focuses on the use of digital technologies to provide access to collections, do not mention collaboration specifically, they do encourage Integrated Access Projects. Projects that "unify, integrate, or aggregate humanities collections," would necessarily require communication and collaboration between participating archives or institutions.