History of Grant Funding

In 1992, Jane Dalrymple-Hollo, a conservator, archives student, and wife of Naropa professor Anselm Hollo, submitted a proposal to the NHPRC for a small grant to conduct a survey of Naropa’s archival collections. The grant was funded and the subsequent study determined Naropa’s collections of analog audio and video materials to be the most –at-risk collections. As Naropa is a small institution with very limited resources, funding to properly preserve these collections was also limited. However, a small group of very passionate faculty, staff, and students, mounted an effort to raise funding, going even so far as parking cars for a fee in the Naropa parking lots during University of Colorado football games. With their persistent efforts, the Naropa University Archives was awarded a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2002. This was the first of a series of federal grants designed to fund the preservation and reformatting of the at-risk audio collections.

For the past three years the Naropa University Archives has been funded by generous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Save America’s Treasures, the GRAMMY Foundation, the Collaborative Digitization Program, and private donors, to digitally reformat and make accessible the unique analog audiotapes generated through the activities of Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, now known as the Writing and Poetics Department, founded in 1974 by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. In addition, the National Film Preservation Foundation funded the preservation of the Bobbie Louise Hawkins Home Movie Collection, a fascinating view into the personal lives of many distinguished 20 th Century writers.

Having completed work to digitally reformat, catalog, and make accessible 2000 hours of audio recordings from the Writing and Poetics Collection, the Naropa University Archives is now expanding its activities into a university-wide archives and records management program. In addition to collections documenting the work of individuals, the Naropa University Archives has also collected significant papers related to the activities of Naropa University departments, including Academic Affairs, Development, the Office of the President, Marketing and Communications, and other legal, financial, faculty and student records. These papers provide a fascinating history of the growth of a small Buddhist Institute into a fully accredited university. The goal for this program is to provide access to the complete historical records of Naropa University to a wide range of students, scholars, and lifelong learners.

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