Enhancing Environmental Monitoring at the Museum of Chinese in America

FAIN: PG-52326-14

Museum of Chinese in America (New York, NY 10013-3601)
Yue Ma (Project Director: May 2013 to October 2015)

The development of an environmental monitoring program, including the purchase of dataloggers, for the Collections and Research Center of the Museum of Chinese in America. The bulk of the collections is from the 20th century and documents the history of Chinese culture in the United States through photographs, oral histories, newspapers, magazines, books, and scholarly journals. The oral history collection includes 320 recordings that document voices from diverse perspectives including the lives of garment, restaurant, and laundry workers; nightclub performers; and community residents. Topics covered in these oral histories include the Chinese-American experience and neighborhood gentrification; interviews from the 9/11 Chinatown Documentation Project treat the lasting impacts of the attacks on the Chinatown neighborhood. The museum's collections have provided sources for numerous scholarly publications on Chinese-American history and the wider Chinese diaspora and also support permanent exhibitions open to the public.

The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) respectfully requests a grant of $6,000 to establish an environmental monitoring program consisting of 10 dataloggers and appropriate monitoring software in the Museum's Collections and Research Center located at 70 Mulberry Street in New York City. An environmental monitoring program is part of a broader long-term effort to preserve the collections that document the history and culture of Chinese America. Most collections date from the early- and mid-20th century to the present day, and include 2,800 square feet of photographs, artifacts, and memorabilia, 2,000 oral histories, 2,000 books and 6,000 newspapers, newsletters, magazines, and scholarly journals from MOCA's library that were published between 1900 and 1980. The project will allow MOCA to control climate conditions in collections storage areas, assist a separate effort to restore its HVAC system to an optimal level, and assess the collections' sustainability in their current location.