Northern Illinois University Libraries staff members have ended work on two federally funded projects in light of the White House’s sudden change in policy regarding libraries and the humanities. On March 14, 2025 the president signed an executive order dissolving the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and terminating of all grant projects then in process. In early April parties working with grant funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) began receiving letters informing them of their awards’ cancellation.
The Digital POWRR Project, which provides in-person professional development training for librarians and archivists working to preserve digital materials, was in the last six months of an NEH award totaling over $349,000. The grant supported the provision of five three-day institute events at no charge to a total of 150 participants. The end of funding led project staff to stop project activities on April 2, per federal guidance, and cancel the final event, scheduled for Seattle, Washington on May 13-15. The project has in the past thirteen years won a total of over $1.4 million in federal awards. Research has shown that digital materials such as image, sound, and video files are more susceptible to loss than analog materials like books and manuscripts. The Digital POWRR Project began in NIU Libraries in 2011 and has in recent years evolved into a partnership in which NIU Libraries coordinated activities with the University of Arizona Libraries and Indiana University Libraries. Project activities have proven especially effective in helping practitioners employed at smaller organizations lacking large financial resources to devise procedures and workflows improving their capacity to preserve digital materials. For example, POWRR staff helped curators of a Native American tribe’s historical records to preserve a file capturing tribal elders’ conversation in their native language, which is believed to be the sole surviving record of that language’s use in speech.
The Latinx Digital Archive Project, the recipient of a 2024 IMLS award for $348,000, also halted project activities on April 2. This project had begun the digitization, cataloging, transcription, and online presentation of over 300 oral history interviews conducted with members of the Latinx community in Illinois and surrounding states. Oral histories play an important role in Latinx Studies, as libraries, archives and other cultural memory organizations have seldom preserved records documenting Latinx activities.
Northern Illinois University Libraries Director of Digital Scholarship Drew VandeCreek remarked, “We thought that the change in presidential administration might impact our projects in some way, but their total cancelation was a very unpleasant surprise. We believe in retrieving and acknowledging the whole historical record, or at least as much of it as we can find. Now we have two instances in which we have to find another way to do that.”
On April 10 the New York Times reported that funds from canceled NEH projects will be redirected to supporting projects creating 250 life-size statues of “great individuals from America’s past,” which will inhabit a new Garden of American Heroes sculpture park.
