COLLECTING STORIES : CONNECTING OBJECTS

Introduction

In 2001 the Network funded the travel of four Inupiaq elders and a youth from Alaska to Washington, DC, for example, where they examined, named, and demonstrated how to use some of the 400 objects that had been collected from their village and stored at the Smithsonian since the late 19th Century. Similarly, the Network underwrote the survey of a collection of photos taken by civil rights activist Jack T. Franklin during the 1960’s that included development of a video oral history interview with Franklin to give added context and depth to about 250 of the images that are now available as part of the MLN directory. In related fashion the MLN also supported a survey by the Chinese Historical Society of America that engaged community volunteers in identifying and cataloguing materials documenting daily life in California’s Chinatowns in the early 1900’s.

All three projects (and numerous others) demonstrated how inadequately documented and catalogued many museum objects are – especially those that are rarely exhibited – and how urgent the need is to preserve their histories and stories before they are lost.

In June 2005 the MLN brought twenty-five individuals from across the country together to consider how museums might address this crucial need and opportunity. Meeting first in the historic Abiel Smith School on Boston’s Beacon Hill – built in 1834 to offer public education to African-American children, and the first such edifice in the country – and later in Cambridge, the conclave extended a conversation begun in 2000 on the potential for museums and the objects they hold to catalyze collaboration. [continue→]