Displaying items by tag: institute of museum and library services

Another $150,000 in federal funding has been procured for a New York historic site where previously unknown wall paintings by a famous 19th-century artist have been uncovered.

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer announced this week that the Institute of Museum and Library Services has approved the additional grant for the home of Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole.

Thanks in part to a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Historic New England announces the completion of a digitization project that makes its extensive wallpaper collection more accessible.

For the past two years, Historic New England has been cataloguing and digitizing its wallpaper collection. Now, more than 6,000 samples have been electronically catalogued and are available at WallpaperHistory.org. The collection includes rolled, flat, oversize, and three-dimensional materials, which each require unique handling and digitization methods.

There are roughly 11,000 Starbucks locations in the United States, and about 14,000 McDonald's restaurants. But combined, the two chains don't come close to the number of museums in the U.S., which stands at a whopping 35,000.

So says the latest data release from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent government agency that tallies the number and type of museums in this country. By their count the 35,000 active museums represent a doubling from the number estimated in the 1990s.

The Dallas Museum of Art today announced the debut of the first Friends membership pilot program at The Grace Museum in Abilene, Texas. Grace Friends offers free membership to all visitors and is modeled on the DMA free membership platform, which since its launch in January 2013 has welcomed more than 62,000 new Friends members. The introduction of the membership model in Abilene represents the first stage of a broader national expansion supported by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Other participating museums considering aspects of the Friends platform include the Denver Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Along with the launch of the program, The Grace Museum has also announced reduced general admission to support visitor participation.

The Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington has launched a website that allows users to explore its vast collection from any location. The eMuseum features the institution’s best known works of art, many of which are not currently on view, and allows visitors to browse collections by object or artist. Users can view images of each work and create their own collections through the site.

To date, over 1,000 paintings, drawings, and sculptures have been photographed, catalogued, and uploaded to the website. The museum’s entire 12,500-work collection will be available online by 2018. The first phase of the project was made possible thanks to a $13,000 Museums for America grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and support from the Welfare Foundation. 

The Delaware Art Museum focuses on American art of the 19th through the 21st centuries and English Pre-Raphaelite art of the mid-19th century. To access the museum’s new database, click here.

The Delaware Art Museum received a $130,000 Museums of America grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The grant will help fund a two-year Collections Stewardship project, which will make over 5,000 works on paper from the museum’s collection available to the public through a new searchable digital database.

In June 2013 the Delaware Art Museum received funding from the Welfare Foundation to begin a five-phase Collections Accessibility Plan. The recent IMLS grant will fund the second phase of the initiative. The institution plans to have most of its collection available online by 2018. The goal of the project is to reinforce the Delaware Art Museum’s mission “to connect people to art.” The Delaware Art Museum boasts a large collection and one of the most comprehensive groupings of Pre-Raphaelite art outside of the United Kingdom.

Margaretta Frederick, Chief Curator and Curator of the Bancroft Collection of Pre-Raphaelite Art, said, “This is an incredible opportunity for the Museum. Putting the collection online allows us to serve our diverse audiences more effectively through expanded access to collections-related information, images, and scholarship.”