Five College Consortium-based collaboration to create shared museum collections resource for students
A major effort by a Five College Consortium-based collaboration to create a shared museum collections resource for students, researchers and the general public has received a $350,000 boost from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
Known as Enrich/Discover, the project will increase the accessibility of thousands of museum resources by ensuring their descriptions are clear and culturally accurate and making them easier to find by Five College students and faculty members, as well as the general public. Led by Jessica Nicoll, director and chief curator of the Smith College Museum of Art, and Tricia Paik, director of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Enrich/Discover will be informed by five cultural advisory councils composed of experts with academic, professional or lived knowledge of cultural heritage objects.
“This grant is coming at a critical juncture of our collections management project,” Nicoll says. “A study last year of people accessing our collections showed that we need to be more accurate, equitable and transparent in how we describe objects if we want people to make the best use of these resources. The Enrich/Discover project should help us accomplish that.”
As part of its three-year NEH funding, Enrich/Discover will hire a full-time cataloging librarian who will work with the museums and advisory councils to develop descriptions of museum objects that are both accurate and easy to discover. And by standardizing and aligning how museum collections are cataloged, researchers will be better able to locate artifacts across multiple collections.
Enrich/Discover will serve as a critical component to the museums’ ongoing effort to sustain and evolve a shared collections database and user portal for Amherst College’s Mead Museum, the Hampshire College Art Gallery, UMass Amherst’s University Museum of Contemporary Art, the Smith College Museum of Art, the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and Historic Deerfield–an independent institution. Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of paintings, sculptures, manuscripts and other cultural artifacts will be more accessible online for anyone to learn from and enjoy.
Based in Amherst, Five Colleges Inc. is a nonprofit educational consortium created in 1965 to advance the extensive educational and cultural objectives of its member institutions—UMass Amherst and Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges.