The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is accepting applications for Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections Grants. This program "helps cultural repositories plan and implement preservation strategies that pragmatically balance effectiveness, cost, and environmental impact. Sustainable approaches to preservation can contribute to an institution’s financial health, reduce its use of fossil fuels, and benefit its green initiatives, while ensuring that collections are well cared for and available for use in humanities programming, education, and research." The focus is to ensure preservation of cultural resource materials and implement actions that will "slow deterioration and prevent catastrophic loss."

The NEH is awarding two kinds of grants:

• Planning grants of up to $40,000 "to help an institution develop and assess sustainable preventive conservation strategies."
• Implementation grants of up to $350,000 "to help an institution implement a preventive conservation project"

The deadline for submissions is December 1, 2015. For more information, visit:

http://www.neh.gov/grants/preservation/sustaining-cultural-heritage-collections

Do you have a disaster plan in place in the event that your institution experiences a destructive event? A good disaster plan can be your guide when sorting through the whos, whats, whens and hows that come after such a happening. By asking yourself some simple questions now and assessing your space and collection, you can prevent a lot of confusion and provide yourself with a light at the end of the tunnel when something goes wrong. Here are a few free and easy-to-use resources for creating your own.