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Vol. 24:3 ISSN 0160-8460 December 1996
From the Executive Director
The Uses Of "User-Friendliness"
Suppose you wanted the NHPRC to become more "user-friendly" to grant applicants. (Never mind the term itself, which is too much in common usage to be crammed back into the computer argot out of which it crept.) How would you recommend doing it?
Well, first you might tell us that the orange booklet containing our guidelines is too complicated. It describes a strategic plan under which we offer grants in seventeen prioritized categories. Consolidate those, you might recommend, into, say, four. I am delighted to respond that the Commission has just voted to do that. It will take a while to rewrite and get approval within the government for new guidelines, but when you receive them you'll find them much more, yes, user-friendly.
Next, you might tell us to put the new guidelines on our Web site in a way that will enable grant applicants to read the guidance, fill out the forms, and submit proposals electronically. That would save both applicants and NHPRC staff time and money. Very good. No problem. We are already preparing to do that.
Anything else? Well, if you are having trouble responding, let me suggest that you study a report that the Commission just accepted from the NHPRC staff. In it, the staff reviews our "internal business processes" and makes some 23 recommendations for improving them. The recommendations include reducing steps for grant-letter approval, which means moving faster to authorize grant payments to you. Additionally the recommendations include reducing certain reporting requirements so that you can have more time to spend on actually doing the grant-project work. A lot of the other recommendations also will make us more user-friendly.
(Photo by Philip B. George)
The fact is that, overall, the Commission and its staff together are moving toward something that is more than just user-friendly. As my colleague Richard Cameron puts it, we are trying "to move our emphasis from accountability to accomplishments." We want to reduce the time you must spend on technical requirements so that you can spend more on conceiving and carrying out sound projects. We want to spend less time on the mechanics of grant making and monitoring so that we can spend more on evaluating and publicizing grant-project achievements. In that light, user-friendliness is a way to produce more of real use in documenting American history. And that, I trust, is the goal for all of us.
- Gerald George
Comments, including contrary opinions, are invited. Please send them to Annotation, NHPRC, National Archives Building (Archives I), Room 607, Washington, DC 20408, or e-mail to jerry.george@nara.gov.
