What the NEH Collections Stewardship Grants Will Not Fund

With the new NEH Collections Stewardship Grants, there’s new fine print to get used to and to evaluate before putting together your grant application. In this blog, we’ll cover what the grants won’t fund.

Programmatic Exclusions

The grants will not fund:

• acquisition or financial appraisal of collections

• preservation, organization, or description of materials that are privately held and will not be regularly accessible for research, education, or public engagement after the period of performance

• digitization of United States newspapers

• planning or recording oral history interviews (projects to reformat or provide access to existing sound recordings and moving image collections are permitted)

• recording speakers for language documentation

• editorial and research activities to prepare scholarly editions

• collections description or access projects without prior contact or involvement of the holding repository or organization

• records management for state and local governments

• Geographic Information System (GIS) projects for civic planning or resource management

• restoration, preservation, or stabilization of historic structures, the built environment, or archaeological sites

• costs associated with construction, renovation, or ground disturbing activities

• capital improvements to buildings and building systems, including the purchase or installation of permanently affixed equipment, such as air conditioning systems, lighting systems, high-density storage systems or casework, and security and fire protection systems

• attendance at regular meetings of library, archives, museum, preservation, or humanities organizations, unless the purpose is to convene stakeholders for project-specific activities or to disseminate project results

• the creation of lesson plans or resources designed primarily for K-12 classroom instruction

• tuition remission

• projects that fall outside of the humanities

• the creation or performance of art

• creative writing, autobiographies, memoirs, and creative nonfiction

• policy studies

• social science research that does not address humanistic questions and/or utilize humanistic methods

From the 2026 NEH Collections Stewardship Notice of Funding Opportunity.

While some of the above are obvious, a few could catch an organization off guard if it doesn’t read the fine print. Let’s break down a few of them.

the creation or performance of art

This is already covered by the National Endowment for the Arts and is a little outside the purview of the humanities.

planning or recording oral history interviews (projects to reformat or provide access to existing sound recordings and moving image collections are permitted)

Not paying for the creation of oral histories surprised me at first, but it makes sense. We have so much technology at our fingertips that can be repurposed for recording oral histories. Recording someone’s memory of an event isn’t as cost-prohibitive as it used to be, unless you’re setting up a Ken Burns-level studio to distribute the interview widely.

Paying for the migration of oral histories into modern formats or providing access to them, on the other hand, is a very modern and forward-thinking concept. We’ve had nearly 40 years to create modern digital materials, whether audio, visual, textual, or otherwise. It’s time for us to focus on migration and the continual upkeep of these files.

If oral histories are sitting on reel-to-reel tape, it’s time to migrate them to a digital format. If they’re stored on external hard drives, it may be time to move them into software or a system where they can be properly managed and accessed by remote users.

digitization of United States newspapers

This keeps NEH from having to evaluate who owns the copyright to the newspapers or, better yet, from having to evaluate the research behind or feasibility of an applicant’s copyright claims.

It also keeps the federal government from duplicating existing funding efforts, such as the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America initiative.

It does pose the question: does the grant fund the digitization of non-US newspapers? 

creative writing, autobiographies, memoirs, and creative nonfiction

the creation of lesson plans or resources designed primarily for K-12 classroom instruction

editorial and research activities to prepare scholarly editions

While these are all noble projects, I love that this grant is just for collections stewardship.

Collections work is often treated as something that happens behind the scenes or as a preliminary step before an exhibit, publication, classroom resource, or other public-facing project can begin. This grant recognizes that preserving, organizing, describing, digitizing, and providing access to collections are worthwhile projects on their own.

collections description or access projects without prior contact or involvement of the holding repository or organization

This one might sound obvious, but I’ve actually had people reach out to me with a great project idea: bringing together all types of records related to X.

The problem is that this usually isn’t feasible for a hundred reasons, the first of which is that the person proposing the project doesn’t control any of those records.

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If your organization already has a collection and a project in mind, Backlog can provide a scope of work, cost proposal, and letter of commitment for the work we would complete using grant funds.

Visit our NEH Collections Stewardship Grant Counseling page to learn more.