$15 Million in Grants Awarded to Preserve Books, Newspapers

The National Endowment for the Humanities on Wednesday granted $15 million to preserve old and rare books, newspapers and other resources that are in danger of decaying.

The grants, ranging from $2,800 to $2.5 million, have been awarded to 25 institutions in 14 states, including the New England Ivy League schools Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale and Brown.

The money will help libraries to preserve on microfilm books as well as photographs, monographs and videotapes used in scholarly research that would otherwise disintegrate from acid residues and be lost to future generations.

Harvard will receive $1.8 million, which it will use to microfilm more than 27,000 volumes on American and Italian history it began collecting when the library opened in the 17th Century.

The university also will use the funds to microfilm its volumes on pre-Soviet Russian law, much of which is no longer available in the Soviet Union, said Sidney Verba, director of the university library.

“Our books about pre-Soviet Russian law are consulted by people from all over the world, including Russia,” he said. “We have many visiting scholars from Eastern Europe because these books are either not available or not accessible in their own countries.”

Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H., will receive $409,000, which it plans to use to microfilm some 650,000 pages of state newspapers.

Yale, in New Haven, Conn., was selected to receive $215,000 for the preservation of some 4,000 volumes from its European history collection.

Endowment Chairman Lynne Cheney said the grants are the largest ever allocated for preservation projects and will help save some 167,300 volumes nationwide.