The library has been granted a $1 million challenge grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to create an endowment to support the purchase and preservation of the humanities collections.
To qualify, the library will have to raise $4 million in matching gifts. The award will be used to create endowments, the income from which will be used to maintain and preserve Berkeley's humanities collections.
The $5 million endowment will support curriculum and research in American cultures, and international and area studies and will build in all formats: books, periodicals, manuscripts, pictorial images, data files and networked resources.
The difficulties of maintaining accessible, organized collections in the face of burgeoning new publications, decaying old ones, increasing costs and declining budgets have challenged the ability of great libraries such as Berkeley to continue to build and sustain extraordinary collections.
Berkeley's award was one of 30 challenge grants announced by NEH.