National Grant Boosts Expansion of the Innovative Quilt Index

November 1, 2004

Louisville, Kentucky and East Lansing, Michigan, November 1, 2004,-The Quilt Index is changing the face of quilt research and providing unprecedented resources at the Center for the Quilt Online. This Alliance for American Quilts collaboration with Michigan State University Museum, in partnership with MSU's MATRIX - The Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online has been awarded a nearly half-million dollar grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Washington, D.C., to lead a national initiative to link and access the repositories of museums and libraries around the country.

The $495,996 award, from the IMLS's National Leadership Grant for Library-Museum Collaboration program, supports the further development and expansion of the Quilt Index as an innovative national model. In this new phase, the grant will support new Index partnerships with the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum; the Museum of the American Quilter's Society; the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum; the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries; and the Winedale Center for the Quilt at the Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin. This phase will expand the Quilt Index to more than 15,000 quilts and the associated documentation available for searches across the collections for patterns, individual quiltmakers, themes, techniques, and many other characteristics. Moreover, it will result in a model for repositories--of any size and anywhere in the world--to make thematic collections of any kind more accessible and useful for education and research.

Tradition meets Technology

The Quilt Index idea was incubated by The Alliance for American Quilts, a nonprofit organization comprised of a broad range of key scholars, curators, librarians, and quilt artists in the U.S. dedicated to the study, preservation, and sharing of American quilt history. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Index was developed and piloted by MATRIX and the Michigan State University Museum, in partnership with The Alliance and three national partners with significant repositories of state quilt documentation data.

The Quilt Index merges tradition with technology and springs from the work of a uniquely-specialized team of researchers and experts who are committed to making significant quilt-related data accessible for research and teaching as well as developing replicable applications of technology in the humanities. Already the pilot phase of the Quilt Index has resulted in material that services the collection management needs of individual repositories and, at the same time, makes their collections accessible to worldwide users.

In support of learning

National Leadership Grants provide an opportunity for libraries and museums to develop collaborative approaches for addressing the needs of a learning society. The ultimate goal is to enhance public service in support of learning, and institutions are encouraged to develop programs in research, technology, preservation development, and community-based partnerships. The awards in this IMLS funding category are highly competitive and the Quilt Index was one of only 19 recipients nationally. For more on the awards, see the IMLS web site at www.imls.gov/news/news.shtm.

"At IMLS, we recognize that museums and libraries share a fundamental educational mission. They exist to support learning," explains Robert Martin, director of the Institute. "When museums and libraries join forces, their partnerships can be more powerful and their projects can reflect the best thinking in the realm of lifelong, informal thinking. It is our hope that these grants will provide models for the best practices of tomorrow's museums and libraries."

Principal Quilt Index partners

The Alliance for American Quilts, a national nonprofit organization founded in 1993 and headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, supports and develops projects to document, preserve, and share the history and stories of quilts and quiltmakers. The Alliance brings together institutions and individuals from the creative, scholarly and business worlds of quiltmaking to advance the recognition of quilts in American culture. For more information, visit
www.centerforthequilt.org or contact Shelly Zegart or Karen Musgrave, (502) 897-3819 (tel and fax).

Michigan State University Museum, the state's natural and cultural history museum, is home of the Great Lakes Quilt Center. The museum has a long history of engagement in research, education, exhibitions and service projects related to quilts, and holds a collection of more than 500 quilts, quilt-related ephemera and documentation. For more information, visit
www.museum.msu.edu or contact Marsha MacDowell, (517) 355-2370 (tel).

MATRIX - The Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences at Michigan State University is devoted to the application of new technologies in humanities and social science teaching and research. It creates and maintains online resources, provides training in computing and new teaching technologies and creates forums for the exchange of ideas and expertise in new teaching technologies. For more information, visit
www.matrix.msu.edu or contact Professor Mark Kornbluh, (517) 355-9300 (tel); (517) 355-8363 (fax).

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