ZPA28349222

Preserving the past, supporting the staff: Preservation and access at the Center for Jewish History.

At the Center for Jewish History, an NEH ARP grant will fund preservation activities adversely affected by the pandemic, expand access to collections in response to the current moment, and help secure 15 humanities jobs.

The Center is the collaborative home of five in-house partner organizations whose holdings form the largest collection for Jewish history and culture in the world outside Israel. Partners rely on Center staff for the reading room, online catalog, and archival preservation services.

With NEH ARP funding, Center staff will address preservation needs largely put on hold during the pandemic: preserving physical collections, reinvigorating the digital preservation program, and preserving at-risk audiovisual items.

The Center will also increase access to collections in response to the moment by preparing an exhibit on Jewish emancipation, digitizing materials on Black-Jewish race relations that have seen recent research interest, and providing digitization on demand.

Purpose: The purpose of this grant is to retain 14 core staff jobs and hire an intern to sustain public-facing and preservation-oriented services of the Center for Jewish History (CJH). CJH is the collaborative home of five in-house partner organizations whose collections evidence the multi-dimensional history of Jewish people from around the world.

Activities to be performed: These staff members will engage in preserving physical collections, increase access to collections by continuing to provide digitization on demand, and prepare an onsite exhibit among other activities at the nation's largest repository of archival materials on Jewish American history and culture.

Other activities include the continuation of the born-digital task force with partners, expanding born-digital workflow documentation, and revisiting and revamping an out-of-date digital preservation policy draft.

Expected outcomes: The grant will allow for the preservation, processing, and digitizing of a wide range of collections, including at-risk audiovisual materials. The continued functioning of the Center for Jewish History will result from this grant, specifically the reading room, the online public access catalog (search.cjh.org), and the network of systems used to manage all five partners' library, archive, and museum holdings will remain available.

The intern position will revive a previous, successful conservation internship program and will create a more sustainable staffing model for the preservation services lab.

Intended beneficiaries: Researchers, scholars, educators, and the public will benefit from the continued operations, as will the five in-house partner organizations served by the Center for Jewish History. In 2019, the Center welcomed over 46,000 visitors onsite (67% adults, 22% seniors, 6% students, 5% children).

Subrecipient activities: The recipient does not intend to subaward funds.

The Center For Jewish History

45.149 - Promotion of the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access

National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

New York United States

State-Wide

None

COVID-19 $199,791 (100%) percent of this Project Grant was funded by COVID-19 emergency acts including the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.