Eighteen months ago, curators at Canterbury Shaker Village embarked on an inventory of nearly 50,000 objects. They assess the health of each item to determine if any conservation measures are necessary to keep it in good condition.

That process is an important part of caring for pieces of history, said Shirley Wajda, the museum’s curator of research and collections, and may now be in jeopardy as a result of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump last month.

McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord is using $54,000 it was awarded for a cataloging project to create a digital archive system to allow the public to view each of its items online for research. That project is supposed to launch online this summer.

Other projects may need to find alternate funding or be canceled following significant cuts to the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, which distributes about $160 million in grants to educational and research projects across the country. Trump’s executive order aimed to reduce “elements of the Federal bureaucracy that the President has determined are unnecessary.”

On Monday, museum and library services employees were placed on administrative leave.

Those actions could result in disruptions to grants that help the Shaker Village and the McAuliffe Center, and on a larger scale, they could erase a major funding source for small museums across the country.

The New Hampshire State Library received $1.5 million from the Institute of Museum and Library Services last year, according to the federal database. Museums across the state have received more than $1 million from about a dozen grants  from the agency over the past 10 years. Part of that was pandemic relief funding.

Canterbury Shaker Village doesn’t rely on federal funding to operate, but Wajda said she’s worried about the future of the inventory project. Ever since the executive order came out, she’s felt “nervous, tired and edgy.”

“It’s a necessary project if we are going to fulfill our mission and be a good steward of the Shakers’ legacy here,” Wajda said. “We’re just kind of working hard and waiting to see what’s going to happen, but we’re nervous about it all.”

The Canterbury Shaker Village’s grant of about $211,000 pays for one full-time and one part-time curator who are performing the inventory over three years. Monday marked their official halfway point.

Museum leaders said they haven’t received correspondence from the federal agency about the future of their funding. As far as Wajda knows, the grant remains intact, but the employees who administer those grants across the country were placed on leave.

Erin Hammerstedt, executive director of the Canterbury Shaker Village, said if the grant falls through she’s prepared to search for other funding sources.

“I know that’s going to be tricky because there are lots of things on the chopping block right now,” Hammerstedt said. “We’re certainly hoping, still hoping that that might not happen, because this is the best source of funding for this project.”

At the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord, Edwards said having an agency like the Institute of Museum and Library Services provides a dedicated, targeted source of funding specifically for libraries and museums. 

That “doesn’t really exist anywhere else” on that level, Edwards said.

Its dissolution would be “detrimental” to the McAuliffe center, she added, which had planned to seek nearly $100,000 in grants to pay for a physical upgrade and redesign of some exhibits, as well as a potential new exhibit. 

Edwards said she may have to find other funding sources to complete that work and could end up competing against a wider pool of applicants and subject areas without the targeted resources at the agency.

“Not knowing what’s going to happen, it really throws a monkey wrench in your planning. Trying to be thoughtful about your long-range goals, it completely just disrupts all of that,” Edwards said. “It’s also really, really disheartening because I’m a very big believer in the importance of government support of educational and learning institutions. So, it’s really painful for me personally to see these organizations that I know are so important to be dismissed or closed down.”

Edwards said she thinks people don’t always appreciate what museums and libraries bring to everyday life. The McAuliffe center, which receives visits from 20,000 students each year, “enhances” learning beyond the classroom.

“You can’t just deliver that kind of content in a very sterile, dry way,” Edwards said. “There have to be multiple avenues for exploration to really get the level of inspiration that sparks the big ideas and helps people think big-picture and grandly, so I don’t think they are a nice-to-have. I think they are a must-have.”

 

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, subscribe to her Capital Beat newsletter and send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.