Monroe County Local History Room director selected as NEH grant panelist

Jarrod Roll, director of the Monroe County Local History Room & Museum, was recently selected to serve on a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) panel for “Preservation Assistance Grants (PAG) for Smaller Institutions.”  

As a panelist, Roll reviewed and evaluated 13 grant applications submitted by historical organizations from around the United States wishing to obtain NEH funding for preservation projects.  After reading each applying organization’s grant application, Roll was directed to provide a thoughtful assessment of each proposal’s strengths and weaknesses as measured against the goals and criteria for PAG grants.  

According to the NEH, “Preservation Assistance Grants help small and mid-sized institutions — such as libraries, museums, historical societies, archival repositories, cultural organizations, town and county records offices, and colleges and universities — improve their ability to preserve and care for their significant humanities collections. These may include special collections of books and journals, archives and manuscripts, prints and photographs, moving images, sound recordings, architectural and cartographic records, decorative and fine art objects, textiles, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, furniture, historical objects, and digital materials.”

The 13 grant applications Roll reviewed came from organizations ranging in size from volunteer-run historical societies to research libraries with a handful of professional staff. According to Roll, all projects applying for a grant had some merit, which made evaluating them challenging.  

“It makes sense that the NEH asks museum professionals who work at smaller-sized institutions, like me, to evaluate grants submitted by smaller-sized archives and museums, because we can relate to their preservation needs,” Roll said. “Many of the projects applying for funding were just looking to hire a professional consultant to review their storage situation and give them some direction with how to best take care of what they have; real ground-level stuff. Even though it takes quite a bit of time to carefully review each grant proposal, I chose to be a panelist because the History Room may apply for a Preservation Assistance Grant in the future. Having evaluated over a dozen grant applications, I now have a much better idea of what goes into creating a quality grant application.”

The Monroe County Local History Room & Museum is located at 200 W. Main St., Sparta, and open Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Call (608) 269-8680 or visit MonroeCountyHistory.org or Facebook.com/MCLHR for more information.

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