Steve Bromage, Maine Historical Socety Executive Director - The elimination of the Institute of Museum & Library Services (IMLS) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) will fundamentally alter the landscape for cultural organizations and communities throughout the country.
Like colleagues everywhere, I am trying to figure out how to plan, lead, and respond to the major cuts being made across the federal government—sudden, indiscriminate cuts that will have incalculable impacts on our work, institutions, and communities.
The elimination of the Institute of Museum & Library Services (IMLS) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) will fundamentally alter the landscape for cultural organizations and communities throughout the country. These agencies are primary funders for libraries, museums, historical organizations, and arts groups that enrich their local communities in immeasurable ways and are the fabric of American life. They provide places for Americans to come together, to connect as neighbors, and to explore, learn about, and celebrate the United States—the amazing, evolving nation we have built, stewarded over the past 250 years, and constantly work to perfect.
This is certainly true here in Maine where cultural organizations are the center of our local communities and civic life in so many ways. Maine's cultural community is a very special group of people and organizations—a community I have been fortunate to be immersed in throughout my nearly 25 years working at and leading Maine Historical Society (MHS).
It is appropriate and necessary to evaluate and refine programs regularly to ensure their focus, effectiveness, and efficiency—that's what we all do in our businesses and institutions. But the ways these cuts are being made is damaging and unnecessarily destructive. Already, the Maine State Library has had to lay off 13 experienced, knowledgeable public servants whose lives are being upended....
IMLS and NEH have continually supported transformative initiatives:
challenge grants that have enabled us to install capacity-building
compact storage and budget-relieving solar panels; digitizing and
providing access to collections ranging from 2,000+ of the earliest photographs of Maine, to 17th and 18th century land use records, to 20,000+ newspaper glass plate negatives from the 1920s and '30s; moving, caring for, and digitizing our entire clothing collection. That's just a sample.