FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Updated - May 4, 2005

Press Contacts
202-653-4632
Eileen Maxwell, emaxwell@imls.gov
Mamie Bittner, mbittner@imls.gov

IMLS Awards $2,794,180 to Museums for Essential Conservation

Washington, DC—Dr. Robert Martin, Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), announced today the 49 recipients of the 2005 Conservation Project Support (CP) matching grants totaling $2,794,180. This year IMLS received 189 applications for a wide range of projects, including conservation surveys, training, research, treatment, and environmental improvements. Museums nationwide of all disciplines, from art to zoo, are eligible for funding.

Conservation Project Support grants help museums undertake their most critical conservation activities. They are awarded through competitive peer review and require a 100 percent match by the applicant.

“I am proud of the role the Institute plays in helping America’s museums care for their collections,” said Director Robert Martin. “Conservation has a significant public purpose: to assure that the ideas and knowledge that museum collections hold are available for future generations. The Conservation Project Support grants we make today will ensure that our country’s cultural, scientific, historic, and artistic heritage is available for a lifetime of learning for all.”

Projects include, among others, a survey of the historic football collection at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio which includes a football from 1890 and the one used in Superbowl I; treatment of 60 pottery vessels from the Casas Grandes site (1100-1400) in Chihuahua, Mexico at Brigham Young University’s Museum of Peoples and Cultures in Provo, Utah; and, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, conservation of five of the Museum’s most important European tapestries from the late 17th to early 18th century.

While conservation work is essential to museums’ educational mission, it often goes on behind the scenes and out of public view. To heighten public awareness of the importance of conservation, IMLS encourages museums to include a public education component to their projects. Three of the awards announced today include public outreach activities. The Arboretum at the University of California Santa Cruz will create interpretive panels highlighting the conservation and protection of the rare and endangered plants and animals under its stewardship. The Slater Memorial Museum at the Norwich Free Academy in Connecticut will develop educational programs on its detailed condition survey of the museum’s 147-piece plaster cast collection, taken from original marbles and bronzes of ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Renaissance masterpieces. And, the Good Will Home Association’s L.C. Bates Museum in Hinckley, Maine will present a workshop on lighting in museums.

Other grants announced today include Museums Assessment Program grants and Conservation Assessment Program grants. This is the first of four grants rounds IMLS will announce for FY2005. The second round will be announced mid-June.