Michigan State University Museum announces a major event this fall: “Unpacking Collections: The Legacy of Cuesta Benberry and a Symposium on Using Quilt History Collections,” to explore the connections between using collections in making or studying quilts.

The symposium is set for Oct. 8-10, 2010 in East Lansing, Mich., and is planned in conjunction with an exhibition that showcases examples of materials from the Cuesta Benberry Quilt History Collections that were recently acquired by the MSU Museum.

Scholars and creative artists use private and public collections of objects and archival materials to inform their work. What do they collect? Where do they find collections and how exactly do they use them? What do they do with the collections when they are done? How have they been inspired by collections? What obstacles do they encounter when building or using collections? These questions and more will be explored in the MSU Museum symposium.

“We were wonderfully surprised and honored that Cuesta Benberry’s collections have come to the Michigan State University Museum,” says Marsha MacDowell, MSU Museum curator and MSU professor of art and art history.  “Research-based collections like hers are critical to still under-studied but important aspects of quilt history and of African American art and cultural history. We know that this collection of primary materials will enable scholars here on campus and around the world to benefit from Cuesta’s trail-blazing work and to carry it forward. Her collections and others held at the MSU Museum allow us also to examine the importance of building and using collections in creative, scholarly, and educational ways,” she adds.

To download the symposium brochure and to register by mail or online, go to:  http://museum.msu.edu/Events/cbsymposium/

Partnering with the Department of History at Michigan State University, MATRIX will be consulting at the archives of the Department of State for Justice in Banjul, The Gambia later this summer.  Professor Walter Hawthorne from MSU History, Scott Pennington, head of digitization at MATRIX, and Ph.D. Candidate Bala Saho will coordinate with local archive staff to assess and begin preservation and digitization of important 19th century government records. This work is made possible by generous funding from the Endangered Archives Program at the British Library.

The King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives, part of the Saudi National Museum and home to the Saudi National Archives, invited Matrix to come to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and consult on digitization. Scott Pennington, Head of Matrix’s Digital Lab, flew to Riyadh to conduct a workshop on digitization with an emphasis on audio and video digitization. Matrix and the King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives hope to form future partnerships.

KORA-2.0.0 is now available on the SourceForge website at https://sourceforge.net/projects/kora/files/KORA/.

The new version includes:

• PHP 5.3 (and PHP 6.0) compatibility
• Improvement of KORA_Search sorting – sorting by KID and date now work as expected
• Additional checks performed at install to ensure compatibility
• Fixed interaction between presets and the hidden timestamp control
• Closer compliance with XHTML standards

With the new features, enhancements, and fixes, it is recommended that all users update to this version as soon as possible. Details on this version are available in the full release notes at https://sourceforge.net/projects/kora/files/KORA/KORA-2.0.0/2.0_release_notes.txt/view.

KORA-2.0.0-beta is now available on Sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/kora/

From the release notes…

KORA-2.0.0-beta is the next major release of KORA. It includes multiple improvements and bug fixes, which are listed in the change log. Those upgrading from a previous version should make sure they read and follow the upgrade instructions. Those installing KORA for the first time can follow the standard install instructions. The README also contains the specific extra step(s) for updating.

New/Updated Features:

*A new geolocation control has been included. This allows a user to input a Google Maps API key into KORA and then choose controls from a scheme to use as query material to return the geographic location. This control is still in beta.

*koraSearch.php has been updated. The search functionality in this file used to retrieve data from KORA had major performance issues as logical operations in queries grew, specifically with AND operations. The updated search algorithm uses PHP for union and intersection operations instead of MySQL which has effectively fixed any performance issues. OR operations were not nearly as slow as the number of clauses were increased, but improvement was also seen in this category.

*An general purpose XML importer has been added, allowing users to upload XML files and then choose how the XML schema is translated into an existing KORA scheme. Files can also be uploaded using a zip file along with the XML file – the XML file must have a XML tag that relates to what file belongs with that record. More documentation on the XML importer will be available with the 2.0.0 production release.

*OAI-PMH framework added. KORA now has the beginning of an OAI-PHM data exchange interface implemented. Final touches need to be added, but programmers should be able to use the existing code for creating services for others to use at current time. More documentation will be available when the feature is fully implemented, planned for KORA-2.1.0.

*A timestamp has been added to each record. This was added for the OAI-PMH code specifically, but does allow the user to see the last time the record was updated. The timestamp is not editable by users.

A team of researchers at Michigan State University will pursue advanced computational techniques to explore humanities themes related to the authorship of large collections of cultural heritage materials, namely 15th century manuscripts, 17th and 18th century maps, and 19th and 20th century quilts.   Awardees are Dean Rehberger and Wayne Dyksen, Michigan State University, NEH; Peter Bajcsy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NSF; Peter Ainsworth, University of Sheffield, JISC. Additional Key Participants is The Alliance for American Quilts.

The Digging into Data Challenge is an international grant competition sponsored by four leading research agencies, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), from Canada.  Applicants were asked to answer the question: “What do you do with a million books?”

Press Releases About the Launch of Digging into Data Challenge (January 2009)

JISC, NEH, NSF, SSHRC

Press Releases about Awardees (December 2009)

JISC, NEH, NSF, SSHRC

Speech by NEH Chairman Jim Leach at DiD awards ceremony.

The Quilt Index, quiltindex.org, the world’s foremost online resource for images and metadata about historic and contemporary quilts, has just launched its website upgrade.

Thanks to funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the site now provides access to records for over 47,000 quilts (up from around 20,000).  New contributors funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Expansion grant and/or by the contributors themselves are:

• Hawaiian Quilt Research Project
• Louisiana Regional Folklife Program
• Minnesota Quilt Project
• New England Quilt Museum/MassQuilts
• The Heritage Quilt Project of New Jersey at Rutgers University Libraries/ Special Collections and University Archives
• North Carolina Museum of History
• Rhode Island Quilt Documentation Project at University of Rhode Island
• West Virginia Heritage Quilt Search, Inc.
• Wyoming Quilt Project, Inc.

You can read about all of the Quilt Index’s contributors at http://www.quiltindex.org/contributors.php.

The expanded site also features a new design and navigation, as well as zoom and comparison tools funded by an Institute for Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant.

IMLS funding along with a generous grant from the Salser Family Foundation made possible another compelling component of the expansion: the Signature Quilt Project (SQP), http://www.quiltindex.org/sqpgalleries.php.  The SQP provided an opportunity to pilot the public submission of privately owned quilts.

Visit the new and improved Quilt Index today at www.quiltindex.org!

_______________________________________________________________________________________

The Quilt Index is a joint project of The Alliance for American Quilts, MATRIX: Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online, and the Michigan State University Museum.

Africa Past and Present, the podcast about history, culture, and politics in Africa and the diaspora, is featured on today’s AHA blog. Produced by Matrix and hosted by MSU faculty members Peter Alegi and Peter Limb, Africa Past and Present highlights interesting and significant people, ideas, and discussions in African Studies from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives.