Chairman's Grant for National Portal to Historic Collections

FAIN: PW-51257-12

American Heritage Society (Rockville, MD 20850-4122)
Edwin S. Grosvenor (Project Director: February 2012 to February 2014)

The National Portal to Historic Collections will provide hundreds of museums across the U.S. with an easy way to put their collections online in a single federated search system, providing researchers with access to millions of historic artifacts, photographs, and paintings for the first time. A prototype was launched in April 2009 in cooperation with the American Association of State and Local History (AASLH). However, at present there is no easy way to aggregate the information. So the Chairman's Grant was requested to build systems to help us collect data and images from the internal collection management systems of historical institutions and then map, standardize, and display the data.