Matrix and the University of Kentucky Libraries’ Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History were recently awarded a National Leadership Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for ongoing development of the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS). The OHMS is a web-based system that provides word-level search capability, allowing users to search more easily for specific terms within recorded interviews, and time-correlated transcript or index to know exactly at what times in the interview these terms occur.

The project team, which also includes partner libraries at Baylor University, Oklahoma State University, and Cleveland State University, will further develop the OHMS into an open-source software tool that will be more compatible and interoperable with a variety of digital library and content management systems. The project team will also produce multimedia tutorials on the use, installation, and deployment of the OHMS tool. This tool will enable a wide variety of libraries and archives to enrich the use of digital oral history collections, inexpensively and efficiently enhancing access to and discovery of oral history online.

How do you preserve information of continuing value and make it available for anyone who might want to use it? Those are the challenges faced by archivists, and teaching students the craft and science of archiving is a tricky business. It has become even more challenging with trillions of digital objects – both born digital and digitized – needing persistence.

Professor Steve Cohen, who works at MATRIX and specializes in learning design and assessment, has been collaborating with Professors David A. Wallace and Beth Yakel at the University of Michigan School of Information to integrate digital archiving tools into their graduate courses. The project, PAVEL (Preservation and Access Virtual Education Laboratory) is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for two years. Recently Professors Cohen and Yakel presented results from the first year of the project at AERI (Archival Education Research Institute). To date UM students have found learning and using the tools an insightful experience. They report gaining insight into the complexity of the digital world that will be home to archived digital objects, and feel that knowing the tools will help them once they once they complete their Master’s degrees. Ultimately the PAVEL will produce a curricular models and an assessment strategy ,  for archiving programs around the world to follow when integrating these tools into their courses.

The Quilt Index launched a survey today to gather descriptions of quilt collections across the globe. The survey is part of a collaborative planning process to expand the Index, funded by the U.S. Institute for Museum and Library Services.

The survey will help develop international partnerships, as well as build on a public listing of international collections of quilts and quilt documentation.

Results will be added to a resource page listing quilt collections on the Quilt Index Wiki.

If you know about, own, or serve as custodian for quilt documentation, individual quilts, or quilt collections located outside the United States, we would love to hear from you. Click here to participate in the survey.

The Quilt Index is a partnership of MATRIX, Michigan State University Museum and The Alliance for American Quilts. The collaborative planning process also involves the International Quilt Study Center & Museum.

The Quilt Index, an online archive of more than 50,000 documented quilts, plans to begin adding quilts from outside the United States to its robust database.  To design a blueprint for creating a truly international digital quilt collection, the Index received a significant planning grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

Already, the audience for the Quilt Index is global, but the plan is for its online collections to be global as well, a logical but not simple next step. Users of the Quilt Index range widely, including historians, librarians, curators, quiltmakers, quilt collectors, genealogists and fabric designers, and all will benefit from making the archive international, with an enhanced capability for interchange and cross-cultural collaboration.

Quilt made by a member of the Mzansi Zulu Quilt Centre, located just outside of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Loaned to the Michigan State University Museum, photograph by Pearl Yee Wong, MSU Museum.

The one-year grant of about $100,000 will help the project’s organizers solve problems such as “supporting multilingual indexing, searching and retrieval of information,” according to the IMLS. In short, the Index wants to build a collaborative virtual museum across dozens of countries and cultures that share a passion for quilting.

The Quilt Index is run in partnership by the Michigan State University Museum, MATRIX Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online at MSU, and the Alliance for American Quilts. All three partners are dedicated to using new technologies to preserve and share the stories of quilts and quilters online. Jointly, the three partners, along with the International Quilt Study Center and Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln -a new partner for this project– will use the grant to assess the challenges of going global, and then develop a plan to respond to those challenges. It is expected that this project will provide lessons to other museums and libraries working on international projects.

The IMLS, the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums, has provided vital support in previous efforts to build and enhance the cutting-edge tech tools for which the Quilt Index is justly lauded.  Regarding this new grant, the IMLS said it believes that museums and libraries “play a vital role in helping us experience, explore, discover and make sense of the world. Through building technological infrastructure and strengthening community relationships, libraries and museums can offer the public unprecedented access and expertise in transforming information overload into knowledge.”

The Index is already a trusted resource used by scholars and quilt enthusiasts all over the world, but the images and data currently online all come from U.S.-based museums and state documentation projects. However, the quilt revival that blossomed across the U.S. beginning in the 1970s is now spreading throughout the world. Both contemporary and vintage quilts are basking in a new glow of appreciation for their worth as both artistic and historic artifacts. The Quilt Index has always endeavored not just to preserve and show significant quilts and tell their stories, but to create multiple tools that allow scholars and historians to study and compare quilts from anytime and any place, and to actively collaborate online.

This new grant will help the Quilt Index prepare to add international quilts to that mix. Among other things, the Index staff will create an extensive online list of international institutions that own important quilt collections and then will help those institutions prepare plans to add their quilts to the Index. The Index is building an international advisory board of 12 representatives knowledgeable about quilt collections in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.
It is not settled yet which country’s quilts will be the first  documented on the Index, but Marsha MacDowell, curator of folk arts at the MSU Museum, who returned recently from a study trip to South Africa, sees great possibilities for the project’s global future. “After visiting textile collections in over 21 museums in South Africa in early 2010, there is real excitement on the part of the staffs of those museums to be able to compare and contrast their own holdings with collections not only around the world, but also within their own country,” she said. “And I am already excited to see how those South African collections are related to the history of world economics, trade, migration, politics, religions, art and cultural traditions.”

For further information about this grant please contact any of the experts listed at the top of the release.  To visit the Quilt Index and study its current resources, go to www.quiltindex.org.

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.

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.

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.