May 19, 2015
Article from the Spring 2015 Newsletter

Thanks to a generous donation from the Windie Knowe Fund, another round of grants from the New York Preservation Archive Project’s Archival Assistance Fund will be offered in 2015! The Archival Assistance Fund, established to help identify and maintain archival resources and organizational documents related to the historic preservation movement, is another example of outreach initiatives on the part of the Archive Project to provide practical assistance to the preservation community. With this Fund specifically targeted to the preservation community, the Archive Project hopes to instill a lasting archival mindset in the New York City preservation civic sector. In 2013 the Archive Project awarded grants from the Fund to worthy archival projects at preservation-related not-for-profits and house museums across New York City. Projects included digitally-regulated cooling, heating, and humidity equipment for the collections at the Morris-Jumel Mansion Museum, archival processing and re-housing at the Merchant’s House Museum, archival reorganization and management at FRIENDS of the Upper East Side Historic Districts, a collection survey and the drafting of finding aids at the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum, and the creation of online access to the archival image collection of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.

The great success of this inaugural round of grants by the Archive Project demonstrates that there is a genuine need for this kind of funding. Despite their unique missions and the diversity of their archival holdings, each grant recipient boasts a record of activism in preservation and a demonstrated commitment to safeguarding the story of those preservation efforts. The Archive Project hopes these projects will serve as inspiration to the next round of potential grantees. The grant application is designed to be simple, asking for a brief project description, timeline, and budget, along with a few relatively brief questions. Projects and expenses may include, but are not limited to, hiring an archival consultant; creating an archival policy; performing a survey of archival collections; the creation of collection inventories and finding aids; collections processing; the purchase of archival supplies and materials; increasing public accessibility to collections; scanning and digitization; and the creation of new management strategies for operational records. Applicants must demonstrate their collection’s significance to the history of historic preservation in New York City, and in honor of the 50^th anniversary of the passage of the City’s Landmarks Law, preference will be given to those projects that can prove a clear relation to the past 50 years of preservation in New York City.