Virtually United: Bringing Disparate Museum and Library Collections Together in Digital Exhibitions
Channel: Franny Gaede
Date: 2021-07-04

Although university libraries and museums overlap in their core educational mission, differences in institutional history, philosophy, and protocols often result in incompatible data management, making it challenging to pursue projects integrating their collections. These challenges can be compounded by the linguistic and material particularities of Asian collections.

The University of Oregon Libraries and Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art recently received a Mellon grant to enhance collaborative use of library/museum assets. The grant funded the creation of digital exhibitions, three of which focus on Japanese or Chinese materials. This roundtable presents these three projects as a case study of collaborative digital research and exhibition production. The responsible scholars are joined by representatives from the Libraries and the Museum to discuss the respective merits of technology platforms, the challenges of working digitally with non-Western materials, and the pros/cons of online exhibitions as sites for collaboration between institutions.

Ina Asim’s The Artful Fabric of Collecting introduces Chinese textiles alongside art, documents, and photographs relating to Museum founder Gertrude Bass Warner’s collections and to sericulture. She will discuss the challenges and rewards of displaying documents and three-dimensional objects in high resolution with Omeka S.

Akiko Walley’s Tekagami and Kyōgire connects an album of Japanese calligraphy samples in the Libraries to sutra fragments from the Museum. She will discuss the limitations and potentials of Mirador as a platform for exhibiting text-oriented non-Western materials.

Glynne Walley’s Yōkai Senjafuda focuses on the UO’s collection of woodblock-printed illustrated votive slips. He will discuss the process of uniting hundreds of disparate items in virtual space using Omeka.

Anne Rose Kitagawa will discuss the experience of Museum’s curatorial, collections management, and photography personnel who supported these projects and how they coordinated the presentation of Asian materials from the Museum with similar resources from the Libraries’ collections.

Franny Gaede will present the perspective of the UO Libraries staff who contributed the technical builds and collaborated closely at every stage of these projects. She will discuss the organizational and technological challenges presented by this kind of collaboration, and share insights gained in overcoming them