Grants help preserve archives at Oakland University

Oakland University has been given funds to preserve records chronicling the university’s history, as well as original materials on the history of Oakland County, the Civil War, women’s studies and other fields.

The university recently received a $9,943 preservation assistance grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund an environmental monitoring program that will help library staff improve preservation of the OU Archives and Special Collections.

Archives and Special Collections Coordinator Dominique Daniel said the OU Archives and Special Collections are a trove of books, newspapers, photos, microfilm, audio/visual materials and artifacts — many of which are centuries old and are held exclusively by OU.

She said the new environmental monitoring program will benefit all of the university’s collections, including more than 100,000 photographs, some 19,000 books, 2,000 linear feet of manuscripts, historical newspapers, thousands of maps and hundreds of artifacts.

This is OU’s second preservation assistance grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2018, the university received a $6,000 grant that funded a general assessment of its archival policies and practices.