Getting to the Stuff

Cultural heritage collections represent important sources for scholars and enthusiasts, and offer ways for us to listen and learn from peoples and processes that are missing from documentary sources. Museum collections help to fill those gaps, but finding those types of collections and data online is challenging. With many students and scholars beginning their research with online search and discovery tools, if cultural heritage collections are not visible online, in some form, what are the implications of these absences? Do those objects and the stories that they help us to tell remain invisible? Increased online visibility of material culture from museums can increase the use of those objects by instructors, scholars, enthusiasts, and students. Once discovered, there is great potential for the museum to benefit from increased traffic, virtual and physical, and use of their collections which only helps the institution accomplish its mission. In the meantime, historians like me, look to other online collections, such as eBay for accessible online material culture. I will discuss my research into online history museum collections and some efforts that encourage getting to the stuff. I wish to engage the audience in answering two big questions: if these collections are online am I correct in assuming that researchers will use them? And, how can digital humanities scholars encourage and advocate for museums to open their collections for discovery and analysis from individuals outside of their institutions.