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Vol. 24:3 ISSN 0160-8460 December 1996
NHPRC Revises Strategic Plan
At its November meeting, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission simplified its strategic plan and revised the plan's priorities.
The previous plan contained seventeen objectives at four levels of priority. In hope of reducing confusion for grant applicants, the Commission consolidated those objectives into just four categories in which grants will be offered. In recognition of the limitations of its funds, the Commission also gave two of those categories priority.
In the revised plan, priority will go to grants for improvements in documentary fields (research and development, tools, training, publications), and to grants for state collaborative efforts to meet documentary needs (state plans, state regrant programs, and work under collaborative agreements).
Additionally, the NHPRC will continue to offer grants for documentary publications (currently supported on-going editions, new projects, and publication subventions), and grants for documentary preservation, access, and use (archival, educational, and promotional projects).
The first two categories, in the view of those who supported their priority, will increase the Commission's ability to leverage its funds and invest them in activities of widespread benefit. For example, the Commission is investing in research-and-development projects that will help archivists cope with problems posed by electronic records and will help documentary publishers take advantage of electronic-access technologies. Also, the Commission is developing its state partnership, through which state historical records advisory boards create plans for documentary progress statewide, then match NHPRC funds for regrant programs to implement those plans.
In the other two grant-making categories, the Commission will continue to help individual archival institutions and documentary publishing projects preserve specific collections of records and make them accessible.
More than a year may be necessary to implement the revisions, which must go through an approval process within the government, and then need to be explained in new guidelines, which will be issued in ample time for grant applicants to take cognizance of the changes.
In other actions, the Commission simplified its mission statement, formalized adoption of some evaluation factors, and voted to reduce its regular meetings from three to two annually when the revisions in its strategic plan are implemented. Grant proposals would be considered at the two regular meetings, and a third could be called by the Commission's chairperson if needed for discussions of policy or other matters.
The simplified mission statement adopted by the Commission says this: The NHPRC exists to carry out its statutory mission to ensure understanding of our nation's past by promoting, nationwide, the identification, preservation, and dissemination of essential historical documentation.
The evaluation factors formalized by the Commission, to be applied "as a matrix in the evaluation of new and on-going documentary publishing projects" and "records projects as applicable," are in summary the following: Usability: the relative usefulness of the material to be published; Availability: the relative current availability of the records to be published; Ability to Complete: the relative prospects for completing publication of the records to be published; and Productivity: the relative rate of progress of a project.
