| Identify Historic Properties |
Develop and maintain a reliable comprehensive national inventory of historic properties that contains information necessary for management, planning, and decision making and that is accessible to users. |
| Develop a comprehensive inventory of our nation’s historic legacy by 2016. |
| Critical information to facilitate access—create a comprehensive inventory of our nation’s historic preservation, archaeological, and cultural resources. |
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| Conserving Cultural Collections |
The conservation of cultural collections must become an essential and central aspect of the basic mission of every cultural institution. |
| Preservation and interpretation of historic properties is inextricably intertwined with the preservation of cultural and historic objects, documents, artifacts, artistic works, and other cultural expressions. |
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| Promoting Innovative Technologies |
Create a cross-disciplinary framework/structure that will act as a national clearinghouse for information exchange and link all existing forums. This will provide opportunity for public, private, multidisciplinary exposure to topics including new methods, designs, and materials. |
| Aggressively promote and reward the use of innovative technologies, existing as well as new, including: digital information storage and dissemination technology, new materials, new analytical and assessment techniques, comprehensive training programs and resources. |
| Cutting-edge technologies are not being fully utilized, either because the information about these technologies is not readily available or because appropriate technologies still need to be developed or modified for use in the preservation field. To remedy this, the historic preservation community must actively promote the development of new technologies and increase opportunities to learn from fellow practitioners and other fields of endeavor. |
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| Sustaining Communities - Measuring and Sharing Preservation’s Benefits |
Evaluate and quantify the costs and benefits of historic and heritage preservation. |
| Devise a uniform set of generally accepted metrics for rehabilitation, historic preservation, and heritage tourism that can be used to measure the direct and indirect economic impacts. |
| Historic preservation has been an economic engine in many communities, stimulating broad-scale revitalization, tourism, job creation, retail vitality, environmental quality, and enhanced quality of life. However, preservation is still widely seen as either an end in itself, a hindrance, or a cost rather than a tool to unlock a panoply of community benefits both tangible and intangible. The preservation community has not done enough to concretely quantify the costs and benefits associated with historic and heritage preservation that could help generate and increase public and private support of the preservation mission. |
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| Sustaining Communities - Providing More Technical Assistance |
Expand our nation’s technical assistance and training in historic preservation to state and local communities through the Preserve America initiative: The Preserve America Community Agent. |
| We need to find better ways to get resources (people, tools, knowledge, and funds) to local communities so they can address historic preservation needs. Local leaders need better access to training, good case studies, and technical assistance. |
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| Sustaining Communities - Increasing Synergy Between the Development Community
and Public Partners |
Dramatically increase the use of the highly successful Federal Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit Program by working with the Program’s preservation partners to increase awareness and understanding by the economic development community and to streamline the administration of the Program |
| Identify and resolve impediments to the use of existing governmental financial incentive programs in connection with historic rehabilitation and, in particular, inconsistencies between such programs and the Historic Tax Credit Program. Remove regulatory barriers and fix legislative glitches that reduce the effectiveness of the Historic Tax Credit Program, and create new incentives for using historic rehabilitation with other governmental incentive programs. |
| Promote mutual understanding across borders, and so empower U.S. communities to make heritage preservation an integral aspect of sustainable development. |
| Artists and cultural institutions are essential to the economic vitality of a community. |
| We recognize the pervasive influence of economics on determining what is important, even if not officially part of the process. Because of the link between official listings and heritage tourism, it is important to acknowledge both the positive and negative effects that economic development through heritage tourism can have on cultural resources. |
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| Educating Citizens - Promoting Heritage Education |
Ensure the public is better equipped to make informed decisions throughout life, based on an individual understanding of history and awareness of the benefits and impacts of historic preservation on communities and the nation. |
| Use historic resources as interactive tools to teach with and learn about American history and build a preservation ethic. |
| Strongly encourage the inclusion of heritage education in national and state history/social studies standards and curricular frameworks. |
| Establish a structure to facilitate connections between teachers and preservationists. |
| Support local-level partnerships for historians, preservationists, and the educational community through state and national programs. |
| Introduce the concept of historic preservation [to students] and discuss why it is important. |
| Enliven history education in the classroom. |
| Integrate historic preservation concepts into a variety of subject areas. |
| If most people do not know what historic preservation is and how it functions in our communities, how can they be expected to appreciate its enormous aesthetic, cultural, economic, and educational contribution to the country? If far too many people do not factor history’s valuable lessons into the equation for making informed decisions about their own future, how can they understand the vital importance of learning from the past to create a better collective future, as the founders of our nation did when creating the Constitution? |
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| Educating Citizens - Engaging the Youth |
Build partnerships with museums, sites, and historic societies. |
| Let us be the historians! |
| Let us be activists in historic preservation! |
| Help us participate in history-related events outside the classroom. |
| Provide opportunities for us to showcase what we’ve learned in a variety of ways. |
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Exploring Improvements to
the Federal Program Structure |
Enhance the leadership of the federal historic preservation program. Brief statement of the idea: Evaluate ways to improve the structure of the federal historic preservation program to achieve greater effectiveness. |
| Raise the profile of heritage resources within the federal government. |
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| Enhance Stewardship |
Create and sustain one integrated and interactive Web site as an economic and marketing development planning tool to support the stewardship of historic assets. |
| Support advances in effective and efficient program management, operation, oversight, and decision making to produce enhanced protection and preservation of historic resources. |
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| Promoting Cultural Diversity |
Evaluate National Register properties to discover areas of under-representation. Improvement needs to be made in the racial, ethnic, and geographic diversity of these official listings |
| Appreciate that history has many different voices. |
Confronting Security Concerns
and the Unexpected. |
Keep public historic properties open to the public. |
| Establish a cohesive Web-based information network for professional preservationists, archaeologists, and other trained volunteers to coordinate response to something unexpected. |
| Develop risk assessment methods appropriate for historic and archaeological properties. |
Provide information and training to help decision makers balance historic preservation with security needs.
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| Encouraging Inclusion of
Preservation in Planning |
Create incentives for recipients of economic and development funds to include historic preservation elements in applicable comprehensive economic development strategies or plans. |
| Ensure a professionally trained work force in historic preservation, archaeology, and cultural resource management for employers in federal agencies, state and local governments, tribes, non-profit organizations, and consulting firms. |
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| Communicating the importance of historic preservation |
Expand the definition of heritage and cultural resources and communicate their critical importance to the public, clearly demonstrating their economic value but, more importantly, their educational and moral value. These assets are not simply worthy of investment; they are essential to maintaining the democratic ideals that shape the life of our nation. |
| Create a national marketing strategy that stresses the significant benefits—to both the public and private sectors— from investment in cultural and heritage resources. It is imperative to better understand the market for heritage development, who is being served, and how to strategically engage that market. |
