A Winning Partnership for NEH Collections Stewardship Grants: George Blood LP & Aviary

Two trusted names in AV preservation — working together to take your grant project from digitization to discovery.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has opened applications for its Collections Stewardship grant program, offering awards of up to $350,000 for individual organizations and up to $500,000 for consortia, with project periods of up to three years. The first deadline is May 11, 2026, with a second deadline of December 15, 2026.

For institutions with audiovisual collections in need of preservation and public access, this grant represents a significant opportunity — and a partnership between George Blood LP and Aviary can help you make the most of it.

The Challenge: AV Collections That Deserve a Wider Audience

Libraries, archives, museums, and universities are custodians of irreplaceable AV materials — oral histories, field recordings, broadcast archives, ethnographic film, and more. Many of these collections sit on deteriorating analog formats, inaccessible to researchers and the public. The NEH Collections Stewardship program is designed to change that, funding projects that preserve and open up collections for research, teaching, and public engagement.

Specifically, the program supports:

This is precisely where George Blood LP and Aviary come in — each handling a critical phase of the work, and together covering the full arc from endangered original to fully accessible digital collection.

George Blood LP: Expert Digitization You Can Trust

George Blood LP is one of the country's leading providers of archival audio and moving image preservation. With more than 35 years of experience serving universities, libraries, and archives nationally and internationally, George Blood LP brings deep expertise to the digitization phase of any grant project.

Their team of professional engineers, preservationists, and information science specialists handles virtually all analog and digital audio and video formats, and is widely recognized for their care with unique and irreplaceable collections — including oral histories, musical performances, and broadcast archives. When your grant project calls for trusted, standards-based digitization, George Blood LP is the right partner.

Aviary: From Digital Files to Public Discovery

Once digitized, your collection needs a home — one built for AV media and designed for meaningful public access. That's where Aviary comes in.

Aviary is a purpose-built platform for hosting, describing, and sharing audio and video collections. Within a single environment, project teams can:

Every one of these functions maps directly to NEH-eligible activities — and all of them happen in Aviary.

Seamless Integration, Start to Finish

The George Blood LP + Aviary partnership is designed to make your grant project flow smoothly from physical media to public access. George Blood LP's digitization outputs integrate directly into Aviary's ingest workflow, eliminating friction between the preservation phase and the access phase. Your team gets a coherent, end-to-end pipeline — and NEH reviewers see a project with a clear, credible path to impact.

For grant applicants, this matters. A proposal that can demonstrate not just how materials will be digitized, but where they will live and how the public will find and use them, is a stronger proposal.

Ready to Apply?

Applications are submitted through Grants.gov. The Notice of Funding Opportunity has full details on eligible activities and restrictions. Questions can be directed to the NEH Division of Collections & Infrastructure at collections@neh.gov or 202-606-8570.

If you'd like to explore how a George Blood LP + Aviary collaboration could strengthen your grant proposal, email the Aviary team. We're happy to talk through how the partnership works and how to position it in your application.