My Cart

Library receives major grant!

After a long hiatus from this blog, the Library is back! We want to announce here to those who don’t already know that the Museum has received a $325,500 grant to catalog several of our negative collections in cold storage. This is big news, and we are so grateful to the Council of Library and Information Resources (CLIR) for funding our proposal.

CLIR, the Coucil on Library and Information Resources

The three-year grant is part of an initiative CLIR developed with the Mellon Foundation to give museums and library funding to hide deeply hidden collections. The collections we proposed for cataloging are indeed very deeply hidden! They are collections of negatives, over 48,000 of them, that the Museum has accepted into its collections and that are now stored for their longevity’s sake in our Cold Storage unit. Some of the negatives are printed, but by far not all. In some cases, such as the Edward Hungerford Photographs, not even staff knew what these images looked like! Now we are making a concerted effort, not just to catalog, but also to digitize negatives that haven’t been examined for a very, very long time.

First negative digitized for the grant: Baden, Austria, 1928. Edward Hungerford Collection

We want to invite you to follow this blog to find out week by week, as our three new project catalogers (Matt, Kit and Alison), explore and learn these collections and help us know better what we have. It’s going to be great fun for all of us!

Scroll to Top