Creating the P.T. Barnum Digital Collection

FAIN: PW-234721-16

Barnum Museum (Bridgeport, CT 06604-4912)
Adrienne Saint-Pierre (Project Director: July 2015 to April 2018)

Conserving, cataloging, digitizing, and creating global access to significant collections of artifacts, ephemera, and manuscripts pertaining to P.T. Barnum, his family, and his business endeavors, including famous attractions such as General Tom Thumb, Jenny Lind, Jumbo, and others.  This project would digitize approximately 970 objects held by the Barnum Museum and Bridgeport Public Library.

The Barnum Museum Foundation, Inc. seeks $214,123 in funding to enable The Barnum Museum and the Bridgeport Public Library to conserve, catalog, digitize and create global access to important humanities collections. The twenty-month long project, from May 1, 2016, to Dec. 31, 2017, is designed to implement a plan developed over the course of a year with an NEH HCRR Foundations grant (awarded April 2013). The plan will allow the institutions to realize their objectives of preserving and creating access to the significant collections of artifacts, ephemera, and manuscripts pertaining to P. T. Barnum and many of his associates, as well as items donated by Barnum and his family. Barnum's international fame has endured because of his extraordinary and diverse achievements, which reach far beyond his well-known circus endeavors.