Autry National Center—Los Angeles, CA
Electronic Cataloging Initiative of the Autry National Center
The Electronic Cataloguing Initiative (ECI) of the Autry National Center seeks to create, update, or enhance records related to artifacts and archival materials in the permanent collections; to create digital images of these materials; and to make this data available to scholars, students and teachers, and the general public over the internet and through kiosk terminals on site at the Center. Advancement of the ECI is also enhancing the ability of Autry curatorial staff to research and organize future exhibitions. This project specifically targets materials held in the Southwest Museum and Braun Research Library collections, combining information about these collections with information about the collections at the Museum of the American West and the Autry Library. The ECI is an essential component in the Center's comprehensive efforts to conserve, protect, interpret, and create broad public access to the Southwest Museum's important collection of Native American and American Southwest material.
Contact:
Rebecca Menendez
Project Manager, Electronic Cataloging Initiative
Collections Management Department
Autry National Center
4700 Western Heritage Way
Los Angeles, CA 90027
Phone: 323-667-2000 x 201
Fax: 323-663-4435
Email:
rmenendez@autrynationalcenter.org
Project Website:
http://www.autrynationalcenter.org/collections
Michigan State University Museum—East Lansing, MI
The Quilt Index: A Model for Distributed Online Management and Presentation of Thematic Collections
This project is developing a Quilt Index as an innovative national model for distributed online management and presentation of thematic collections for museums and libraries. The three main goals are to (1) create a critical mass of quilt objects and information online; (2) enhance online access to the U.S. quilt and quilt information collections in museums, libraries, and archives through improved content management and interoperability; and (3) enhance the value, usefulness, and relevance of the Index's thematic presentation. The model for distributed collections development around a theme can be applied to many different cultural heritage and natural resource areas, from fossil types to historic toy objects. The Index's innovative design pilots a distributed system for entering customized local data that can be replicated locally and shared globally. For libraries, museums, exhibitors, and collections with object-specific foci, the project will offer a model and a road map for creating an online preservation, management, and presentation system.
Contacts:
Marsha MacDowell, Ph.D.
Curator, Michigan State University Museum and Professor, Michigan State University
The Quilt Index, Co-Principal Investigator
West Circle Drive
Michigan State University Museum
East Lansing, MI 48824-1045
Phone: 517-355-2370
Email:
macdowel@msu.edu
Mark Kornbluh, Ph.D.
Professor and Chairperson, Department of History, Michigan State University
Director, MATRIX: Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences OnLine
The Quilt Index, Co-Principal Investigator
310 Auditorium Bldg.
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1120
Phone: 517-355-9300
Email:
kornbluh@msu.edu
Mary Worrall
Assistant Curator, Michigan State University Museum
The Quilt Index, Project Manager
West Circle Drive
Michigan State University Museum
East Lansing, MI 48824-1045
Phone: 517-355-2370
Email:
worrall@msu.edu
Florida, Division of Library and Information Science, Bureau of Archives and Records Management—Tallahassee, FL
The Florida Folklife Digitization and Education Project
This project has digitized 12,000 images and created an index to 52,000 images and over 6,000 sound recordings from the Florida Folklife Collection documenting performances by, interviews with, and fieldwork surveys of folk musicians, craftspersons, storytellers, folklife interpreters and cultural tradition-bearers in such areas as children's lore, foodways, religious traditions, Native American culture, maritime traditions, ethnic folk culture, material culture, and occupational lore.
Contact:
Joanna Norman
500 South Bronough Street
Mail Station 9A
Tallahassee, FL 32399-0250
Phone: 850-245-6700
Fax: 850-488-4894
Email:
jnorman@mail.dos.state.fl.us
Project Website:
http://www.floridamemory.com/Collections/folklife
Monticello/Thomas Jefferson Foundation—Charlottesville, VA
Thomas Jefferson's Libraries
In this project, all available information on the books of Thomas Jefferson (much of it in Jefferson's own hand) are being analyzed to create a complete inventory and annotated bibliographic database of his book collections including 5,000 titles that he sold to Congress in 1815 and 4,000 additional titles. The contents of twelve different lists will be available worldwide for searching through the Thomas Jefferson portal online catalog, enabling correlations between Jefferson's thinking and writing and the vast array of published material that was part of his known world. The principal activities include editing and transcribing manuscript sources, compiling full bibliographic records, and enhancing the title-by-title information with transcription, commentary, classifications, and references to current holdings.
Contact:
Jack Robertson
Foundation Librarian
Jefferson Library, Thomas Jefferson Foundation
P.O. Box 316
Charlottesville, VA 22902
Phone: 434-984-7545
Email:
jrobertson@monticello.org
Project Website:
http://www.monticello.org/library
University of Southern California—Los Angeles, CA
The West Semitic Research and InscriptiFact Projects
"Developing Advanced Technologies for the Imaging of Cultural Heritage Objects"
The University of Southern California has formed a partnership with Cultural Heritage Imaging to develop a tool for three-dimensional, multi-view representation of cultural objects that will be downloadable and available over the Internet. Improving on an earlier version that visualized only one surface of an object, the new three-dimensional tool will be easily used by almost any museum. The target audience includes museums of all sizes, scholars and students of material culture, cultural heritage professionals, and the interested public. The project will also produce the complete process history for each digital object, enabling replication by scholars. It has the potential to set a new standard of best practice for digital representations of cultural heritage objects.
Contact:
Dr. Bruce E. Zuckerman
Director, West Semitic Research and InscriptiFact
Projects Director, Archaeological Research Collection University of Southern California Ahmanson Center
130 Los Angeles, CA 90089-1481
Phone: 213-740-0271
Email:
bzuckerm@usc.edu
Renaissance Society—Chicago, IL
The Renaissance Society Online Exhibition Archive: 1915–present
The Renaissance Society, founded in 1915, is one of the nation's longest-running museums devoted to art of the current moment. As a non-collecting institution, The Society offers a lasting contribution to art history through the documentation of its exhibitions, which trace the development of contemporary art through every major movement in the last century. The Society's current digital archive project uses Internet technologies to expand the museum's website into a vivid public archive, providing unprecedented access to archival images, essays, and other descriptive materials from the entire programming history. Project activities accomplished so far include the development of a searchable database platform on the website, which allows visitors to research information by artist name, exhibition title, date, or artistic media. Photographic and textual archives for the last 174 exhibitions dating from 1971 to the present have been digitized and are now available online, including more than 2,800 images, 109 essays, and four audio-visual clips of video-taped artist talks. In the next phases of the project, The Society will focus on adding more audio-visual components and integrating archival material from 1915 to 1970.
Contact:
Lori Bartman
Director of Development
The Renaissance Society
5811 South Ellis Avenue 4th Floor
Chicago, IL 60637
Phone: 773-702-8670
Fax: 773-702-9669
Email:
lbartman@renaissancesociety.org
Project Website:
www.renaissancesociety.org