Planning to Digitize the Collections

FAIN: PW-269425-20

Harriet Beecher Stowe Center (Hartford, CT 06105-3243)
Briann G. Greenfield (Project Director: July 2019 to August 2021)
Amy Hufnagel (Project Director: August 2021 to May 2022)

A planning and pilot project to establish priorities for digitizing the Stowe Center’s archival holdings and artifact collections related to Harriet Beecher Stowe, her family, and the Nook Farm neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut.  The project would seek advice from focus groups of scholars, teachers, and students; digitize and create metadata for 100 objects; develop and test workflows; and collaborate with state-wide digital platforms to ensure the collections reach a wide audience.

The collection at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center is made up of more than 13,000 published works, 195,000 manuscripts, 12,000 images, 5,000 graphic materials, and 8,500 artifacts which illustrate illustrate important themes in 19th-century U.S. history and can be studied across several disciplines.  The digitization project grew out of the Stowe Center’s desire to meet the expectations of today’s researchers for access to digital resources, update content and metadata to reflect contemporary standards, and bridge collections to programmatic needs more fully realizing our mission. This project comes at the right time for the museum – having successfully completed an NEH-funded interior renovation and reinterpretation of the Stowe House in 2017, the Stowe Center is poised with new leadership to undertake planning for collections digitization as an institutional priority.