The Birthplace of Country Music Museum has received a $6,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation Assistance Grant. The grant will support a preservation needs assessment by preservation professionals from the Northeast Document Conservation Center.
“This grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will help support the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in its efforts to preserve, document, and promote our region’s musical heritage,” said Dave Lewis, Curator of Collections and Digital Media for the museum. “Professionals at the Northeast Document Conservation Center will consult and guide museum staff in preserving the fragile photographic negatives, brittle paper documents, and endangered audiovisual materials in our collections, ensuring that they will be available to our community and to museum visitors for years to come.”
The majority of the museum’s current collections are comprised of audiovisual and paper-based materials. The funded project will focus on immediate, mid-term, and long-range preservation priorities for these materials. The needs assessment will also serve as an important first step in planning the renovation project of the building beside the museum, which was donated to the Birthplace of Country Music this year. It will also help with allocating proper space for the museum’s growing collections and aid in considering appropriate storage conditions.
About the National Endowment for the Humanities
The National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965 created the National Endowment for the Humanities as an independent federal agency, the first grand public investment in American culture. The law identified the need for a national cultural agency that would preserve America’s rich history and cultural heritage, and encourage and support scholarship and innovation in history, archaeology, philosophy, literature, and other humanities disciplines. NEH is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States. For more information about the National Endowment for the humanities, visit www.neh.gov.