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For Immediate Release
September 27, 2010 Home page of the updated and expanded Quilt Index Website (www.quiltindex.org).
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Contact: Amy E. Milne, Executive Director
The Alliance for American Quilts
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QUILT INDEX GETS GRANT
TO PLAN A GLOBAL FUTURE
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ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA and
EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN -September 27, 2010.
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.
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