Making Museum Collections More Accessible: Digital Archives and Data at the Florida Museum of Natural History

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: The Importance and Usefulness of Exploring Old or Forgotten Collections" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Florida Museum of Natural History’s (FLMNH) Historical Archaeology division began a collaboration with the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) over five years ago to digitize museum collections. Funding from a NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant led to the creation of the Comparative Missions Archaeology Portal (CMAP), an online database with detailed artifact and documentary data for three Franciscan mission sites in Florida. We are currently adding a fourth mission site. FLMNH recently received another NEH grant to work with DAACS to reanalyze decades worth of collections from St. Augustine, Florida, and to develop a separate digital archive for that data. This presentation discusses the work necessary to make these collections more accessible to researchers and the public, and how in today’s world collections-based research is just as important, if not more important, than field based research and has led to new and innovative research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: The Importance and Usefulness of Exploring Old or Forgotten Collections   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology