In conjunction with the Department of History at Michigan State University, MATRIX conducted a three-day training workshop and nearly one week post-workshop consulting at the National Records Service in Banjul, The Gambia.  Professor Walter Hawthorne, Chair of the Department of History; Scott Pennington, Head of Digitization at MATRIX; and Bala Saho, The Gambia’s Director General of the National Counsel for Arts and Culture, coordinated 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, and was featured on The Gambian Television and Radio Services News Broadcast.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the primary source of federal support for the nation’s museums and libraries, announces that 13 institutions are receiving National Leadership Collaborative Planning Grants (NLG) totaling $763,715. Grantees will contribute $491,995 in matching funds. There were 62 applications to the program with requests totaling $3,752,309.

Michigan State University Museum is one of two organizations in Michigan to receive funding and the nearly $100,000 grant will be used to expand technology and access for its innovative online resource, the Quilt Index. (The other institution in Michigan to receive a grant is the Ann Arbor Hands-on Museum for a partnership concerning literacy in rural communities.)

The NLG program includes two types of collaborative planning grants, which enable multi-institution project teams to work together to either plan a single project or to produce a white paper that will encourage multiple projects; and project grants, including both research and implementation grants, for which that preliminary work has already been done.

The MSU Museum project encompasses:
Award Amount: $98,173; Matching: $54,136
Grant Category: Library-Museum Collaboration–Level II Collaborative Planning Grant
Project Title: “The Quilt Index: Collaborative Planning for Internationalization”
The Quilt Index is a popular online scholarly and cultural resource that is growing increasingly global in its content and the communities it serves. Internationalization is encouraging, but it presents new challenges, such as supporting multilingual indexing, searching, and retrieval of information. The Michigan State University Museum, partnering with the MATRIX Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online, the Alliance for American Quilts, and the International Quilt Study Center will identify key challenges for globally constructed and shared online resources, and develop a model plan that responds to those challenges.

“National Leadership Collaborative Planning Grants provide opportunities to conduct research and develop the framework to support future projects that have the potential to generate new tools, research, models, services, practices, or alliances that will positively impact museums, libraries, and the communities they serve,” said IMLS Acting Director Marsha L. Semmel. “These projects encourage partnerships that address national issues of importance impacting education, scholarship, and public service and encourage the broad application of standards and models to improve professional practice.”
IMLS National Leadership Collaborative Planning Grants position museums and libraries as partners with other community institutions — from medical centers to gardens and nature centers — in ways that explore assess community needs, solve problems and share data more widely.  For a state-by-state list of grant recipients, see:  http://www.imls.gov/news/2010/073010b_list.shtm#MI .

About the Quilt Index
The Quilt Index (http://www.quiltindex.org) launched seven years ago, and was developed at Michigan State University by the MSU Museum and MATRIX, the Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online. The third primary partner is the Alliance for American Quilts, based in Asheville, N.C., a non-profit organization comprised of a broad range of key scholars, curators, librarians, and quilt artists in the U.S. dedicated to the study, preservation, and sharing of American quilt history. Over the years, the Quilt Index’s growth and expansion has been supported by grants from IMLS and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Quilt Index merges tradition with technology and springs from the work of a uniquely-specialized team of researchers and experts who are committed to making significant quilt-related data accessible for research and teaching as well as developing replicable applications of technology in the humanities.

The online resource extends understanding and use of the museum’s textile collections. The MSU Museum’s Great Lakes Quilt Center has evolved from the sustained and significant quilt-related activities and resources at the Michigan State University Museum and the museum’s long-standing interest in and commitment to preserving and presenting traditional arts history. More than 700 historic and contemporary textiles in the MSU Museum’s collections are used for exhibition and research, and the Quilt Index, in part, helps make these collections – and others — more connected to repositories and users worldwide.

About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services, Washington, D.C., is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute’s mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. The Institute works at the national level and in coordination with state and local organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; enhance learning and innovation; and support professional development. To learn more about the Institute, please visit www.imls.gov.

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.