Columbia, South Carolina – The efforts of the South Carolina State Museum to bring its vast natural history collection into the digital era have lately attracted a significant boost. A magnificent $250,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) will help the museum to digitize an extra 5,000 fossils, therefore advancing its continuous effort to make its collections more publicly accessible.
Comprising the fourth grant the museum has obtained for such projects, this latest money comes from the IMLS Museums for America program. This year’s emphasis is on the Natural History collection of the museum, which features artifacts spanning an amazing 520 million years of South Carolina’s environmental past. Along with helping to photograph these objects, this award will bring 3-D scanning technology into the digitalizing process for the first time.
Amy Bartow-Melia, the Executive Director of the State Museum, underlined the significance of this award in enabling the “Reimagine the Experience” (RTE) campaign of the institution.
“This funding is vital in helping the State Museum achieve the goals of our Reimagine the Experience (RTE) campaign,” says State Museum Executive Director, Amy Bartow-Melia. “This not only expands our ability to increase accessibility to the museum’s collection through our online collections search database that launched last fall, but it will also help us to better prepare engaging exhibitions and on-site experiences for our guests.”
Dave Cicimurri, the museum’s Curator of Natural History, expressed excitement over the project’s potential to unlock the treasures currently hidden away in storage.
“The vast majority of our Natural History Collection currently remains in storage,” says South Carolina State Museum Curator of Natural History, Dave Cicimurri. “This funding creates an exciting opportunity for us to make these important pieces of our state’s ancient past accessible online for researchers, students and people across the world to explore.”
Read also: Pre-fair tickets offer big savings as South Carolina State Fair gears up for October festival
The museum has made major progress since starting its digitizing initiative in 2018. Over 4,400 objects from its art collection—including works of art, pottery, basketry, and quilts—were digitized thanks first grants. The third award helped to classify and photograph items from the Science and Technology collection of the museum; further grants funded initiatives to digitize military artifacts and home items.
The museum’s Collections Digitization team has documented over 20,000 objects and taken more than 35,000 pictures thereby building a strong digital database that aids research projects all around. The South Carolina State Museum keeps underlining its dedication to conserving and disseminating the rich legacy of the state in ever creative and easily available forms with every stride ahead.
