Archives Alive Spring 2010
Posted by Susan | Filed under Archives Alive, News
Susan Hoffman, Archivist
JHSUM is well into the second year of a big push to insure our collections are well preserved and easy to use.
Last year’s grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Minnesota Historical Society, totaling $10,000, allowed us to purchase new shelving for our entire Kaplan Family History Center collection and a state of the art photo storage cabinet, insuring that historic materials diligently collected for the last 25 years will be well-maintained far into the future. This year, JHSUM turns towards technology, upgrading and enhancing our database with the intention of making it easier for everyone to find out what we have in the collection. We are also taking advantage of existing web technology by putting our materials on popular web sites and opening them to commentary from community.
We can do all this because we submitted successful project proposals this past fall to the Minnesota Historical and Cultural Legacy Grants Program and the Oren and Sharron Steinfeldt Family Foundation. Many of you will remember that the state of Minnesota set aside several million dollars during the 2007-8 legislative session to fund projects supporting Minnesota arts and culture. During 2008-9, individuals and groups invested in preserving Minnesota’s cultural heritage came together to assemble the process for allocating the funds for projects. October, 2009 was the first in a series of rolling application deadlines for proposals. Since the October opening bell, JHSUM has submitted four proposals for funding. After committee review, all were deemed worthy of funding.Funding guidelines prohibit more than two projects being “open” simultaneously, however, so funds totaling $14,000 have been awarded to two of the four proposals. The other two projects will be resubmitted for funding after the two accepted projects are completed this summer.
While one of our funded proposals may not sound glamorous—database clean-up and enhancement—it is the most important upgrade of our collection catalogue since it was created in 2003-2004. A critical grant totaling $5,679 from the Steinfeldt Family Foundation made it possible to purchase new software and the very useful guidance of a consultant to help us maximize its utility. When work on it is completed this summer, the new database will allow searchers enhanced search capacity, extensive information about each item in our collection and precise location information.
Our second project makes use of a Minnesota Historical Society Web site (Placeography.org) to mount photos from our popular Steinfeldt Photography Collection of historic commercial and sacred buildings, homes, cemeteries, and social service organizations from around the state onto a web site. The photos will be linked together in virtual tours about Jewish communities in different parts of the state of Minnesota. The tours will feature Jewish places and presence on the Iron Range, The Brainard Lakes area, Southern Minnesota, Duluth, the West Side of St Paul, North and South Minneapolis and Stillwater. One of the added benefits of using this web site—in addition to the fact that it is maintained by MNHS—is that viewers will be able to add their own commentaries, stories and photos to JHSUM materials. Our hope when we wrote the grant was that it will serve as both an educational and social networking site, in as much as viewers can connect directly with each other and the virtual materials to add depth and color to JHSUM content with their own written memories and photographs. Look for more information—and fanfare—in the next issue of GENERATIONS.
