Folger Sustainable Preservation Environment Project

FAIN: PF-50296-12

Folger Shakespeare Library admin by Trustees of Amherst College (Washington, DC 20003-1004)
Stephen C. Enniss (Project Director: December 2011 to February 2014)
Daniel De Simone (Project Director: February 2014 to April 2018)

An implementation project to improve environmental conditions in the library's storage facility and reading room containing 256,000 books; 75,000 rare manuscripts; 250,000 playbills; 50,000 prints, photographs and drawings; and audiovisual materials, all of which pertain to the literature, history, and art of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan period.

The Folger Shakespeare Library requests an implementation grant to fund Phase 2 of the Folger Sustainable Preservation Environment Project (FSPEP), capital improvements to three critical air handler units to help create a sustainable preservation environment for the long-term storage of the Folger’s unparalleled collection of Shakespeare and early modern European resources by 2017. These capital improvements (and the operational changes dependent on them) will ensure that lower summer dew points can be maintained in the Folger vaults and New Reading Room, and follow the recommended actions of Phase 1 of FSPEP, a one-year in-depth study of mechanical system optimization and environmental data in critical storage areas made possible by an NEH Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections planning grant.