From the Washington Post:
Going to Meet Its Public
Indian Museum Will Put Entire Collection Online
Jacqueline Trescott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 30, 2009; Page C01Even with three locations in its empire, the National Museum of the American Indian can display barely 1 percent of its 800,000 objects. To help close that gap, the museum has decided to set up a digital showcase.
On Monday, the museum plans to launch its “Fourth Museum” to give scholars, students, teachers, cultural historians and those far away from the museum’s homes in Washington and New York the opportunity to look into its archives.
And
Researching what viewers want out of a virtual museum, the small team discovered people were curious about how the museum acquired things. “We hadn’t thought of doing a history of how we got the items. We just had brief catalogue cards,” McMullen said.
As McMullen cast her net for more information, she found details that could have been lost to history. Thisba Hutson Morgan, a teacher at the Pine Ridge Reservation School, had collected many items during her years in South Dakota, and her family donated them to the museum, then based in New York, in 1983. McMullen was able to locate Morgan’s granddaughter, who gave her the details her grandmother had shared about the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890 and the ordeal of her grandmother and her students.
The online collection includes one formal portrait of Chiricahua Apaches, taken in March 1887 by John N. Choate at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. It is rare to have a photograph with all the names of the people in the two rows instead of anonymous faces.
The Web site’s organizers want that two-way conversation to continue. “They can ask for more information or offer up more information,” McMullen said. And the museum is continuing the policy of not photographing items that tribes consider sacred or inappropriate for reproductions, she said.
Turtle Talk 