Established in 1998 by Nina Barnes Eidell '74 and George Eidell to support the preservation of library materials.

The Nina Barnes and Ronald George Eidell Endowed Library Fund helped bring a NEH preservation grant to the Brown University Library in the late 1990s. Since that time, we have treated more than 12,000 volumes from humanities collections in order to neutralize their acidic content and extend their useful lives. Other conservation activities have included custom constructed boxes for the books of the Lownes Collection of Significant Books in the History of Science which lines the walls of the Lownes Room in the John Hay Library, special housings for our cuneiform tablets and cones dating from 2000+ B.C.E., enclosures for daguerreotypes of the John Hay family, and the digital reformatting of more than one dozen deteriorating audiotapes from the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays. Currently, we are undertaking an exciting multi-year project with the Northeast Document Conservation Center to conserve the Major John C. Henshaw scrapbook (circa 1879). Treatment will include cleaning, stabilizing and repairing the scrapbook pages, pamphlets, albumen, print, map and journals that comprise the scrapbook, and flattening and protecting the parchment documents it contains, including Henshaw's military commission signed by Abraham Lincoln. Note: The NEH preservation endowment supports the three position involved in preservation activities.