AIP’s Niels Bohr Library & Archives was recently awarded $300,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the form of a Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections Implementation Grant. NEH designed this grant to support preventative conservation measures to prolong the useful life of collections to help cultural institutions preserve large and diverse holdings of humanities materials for future generations.
Thanks to this transformative support from the NEH, the NBL&A and AIP will be able to partner with consultants who specialize in preservation environments, architecture, engineering, shelving, and other infrastructure needs. This will help NBL&A to create a secure vault storage area to house our rare books and archival materials and the recently acquired Wenner Collection of rare books and journals covering nearly 500 years of history. The collection of nearly 3,800 volumes contains works by Ptolemy, Galileo, Huygens, Halley, Newton, Laplace, and many early 19th-century natural philosophers.
The Niels Bohr Library & Archives is a special library and archive that seeks to promote and preserve the history of the physical sciences. Founded in 1962, NBL&A serves as a repository for information in the history of physics, astronomy, geophysics, and related physical sciences, as well as a clearinghouse for information on physics and related science collections held elsewhere. Our archives and manuscript collections provide a rare view of the international leaders, practitioners, and scientific institutions in 20th and 21st century science.