PVM wins NEH Common Heritage Grant!

Museum awarded $12,000 grant for scanning project, student film

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded Prairie Village Museum, Rugby, a $12,000 Common Heritage Grant. The grant will fund a public digital history project and creation of a student film based on the documents and images gathered from area residents.

The museum’s winning project is designed to allow individuals and the Prairie Village Museum to preserve documents, photographs and other historical materials via scanning and photography. The museum will stage several scanning events around the local area where participants can have personal documents scanned for posterity.

Participants will retain the original documents and receive free digital copies saved on USB sticks or CDs and will be invited to contribute digital copies of their documents to the museum’s digital archives and to a student film project and exhibit in collaboration with Rugby High School. North Dakota Studies students will use contributed scanned items to create a short film and exhibit to be presented in 2019.

Heart of America Library in Rugby, also a project collaborator, will host and assist with several of the scanning events. “The library is excited about participating in this project and hopes people will take advantage of such a great opportunity,” said librarian Vicki Hoffart. “The library offers many resources to help people with family and community history and genealogy research. This project fits well with our resources.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency created in 1965. It is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States. The Endowment awards grants to top-rated proposals examined by panels of independent, external reviewers. NEH grants typically go to cultural institutions, such as museums, archives, libraries, colleges, universities, public television, and radio stations, and to individual scholars. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.

Prairie Village Museum is owned and operated by the Geographical Center Historical Society. Founded in 1965, the museum is made up of 20 historic structures and six exhibition halls filled with tens of thousands of artifacts related to local and regional history. For more information, visit the museum website at www.prairievillagemuseum.com.