I spent Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington, D.C. at the spring meeting of the National Historic Publications and Records Commission — on which I serve as the representative of the American Historical Association. NHPRC is perhaps the least well-known of the nation’s federal cultural agencies, but for historians and archivists it is a very important funding agency. NHPRC was originally founded to support the publication of historical records and, later, to assist with archival and records projects. It has been authorized for congressional funding of $10-million a year, though it has seldom received anything like that amount. Indeed, for several years during the second term of George W. Bush, the White House zeroed NHPRC out of the budget entirely, but the hard work of historians and archivists always resulted in some level of appropriations for the agency. Supporters of NHPRC were therefore delighted to find that the Obama White House had proposed a $10-million appropriation for FY2010.
But life is never simple. The fine print of the President’s budget reveals that the OMB has specifically designated $4.5-million of the appropriation for a special project to digitize the papers of the Founding Fathers, thus actually reducing the grants budget of NHPRC to $5.5-million, a sum that is at the low end of historic grants expenditures. This will mean a very restricted grants capacity for most NHPRC projects in FY2010 — and this will hit the history side hardest, since almost all the history grant applicants are regular recipients of NHPRC funding. If the current numbers hold, the NHPRC will have a difficult time next year.
Last year I posted an item about Congressional interest in making the papers of the Founding Fathers available online, and I will not rehearse now what I said then. Clearly there is much to be said in favor of making the material easily available to users, though my personal view is that there is no way NHPRC could effectively spend as much as $4.5-million in FY2010 for digitization purposes. This is a complicated scholarly project that cannot be accomplished adequately simply by throwing money at it. We will have to see whether the project can be developed in a cost-effective manner that serves the purposes of both the federal government and the scholarly community. I am committed to both the NHPRC and the Founding Fathers editing projects, so this will be a challenging period for me.
But, setting aside this problem, this is also an important moment in the history of federal support for the humanities (though neither the White House nor the Congress have conceptualized it as such) — there are now increasing demands for mounting serious scholarship online, and they are beginning to produce a much needed discussion of what such scholarship should look like, and how it should be made available. More on this later . . .
