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.

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/

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!

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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.