For decades, the Pratt Museum has maintained a collection of artifacts, photographs and historical records that document the culture, science and history of Kachemak Bay. Many of these items, or representations of them, have been digitized for internal use, but they haven’t been widely accessible to the public. That’s about to change.
The museum received just over $11,729 through a grant from the Alaska State Museum to move its collections management system online. The new platform will allow the public to search digitized records through the museum’s website. Whitney Harness is the museum's Interim co-executive director. She said the funding covers the software upgrade and supports a graduate internship to assist with the process.
“Correcting the records and making sure that they are able to be migrated from the old software to the new. And that's a very labor intensive process, and so we knew our curator would need that support for this project to realistically happen within a certain time frame,” Harness said.
Memphis Despain, a graduate student at California State University, Long Beach, arrived in Homer earlier this month to take on the role. Despain is reviewing records, fixing file errors, and verifying object locations to ensure a smooth transition.
Since arriving, Despain has been working to sort through nearly 24,000 objects in the collection.
“Which is something that needs to happen, especially with, you know, we had our renovation, and we've just had a lot of changes happening, and so it's really exciting to have the collection given that attention and the records updated in that way,” Harness said.
The legacy system in place now is only accessible to museum staff. After the upgrade to a cloud-based system, the public will be able to access the archive through the Pratt Museum’s website.
Some restricted items will remain unavailable due to privacy and reproduction rights.
The project is scheduled for completion in late June. Harness said tracking how people engage with the collection will provide insight into what visitors are most interested in.
“I think that is a huge part of providing targeted and relevant exhibitions to the community and allowing for more community members to be engaged in the museum in the long term. Maybe they decide that they didn't realize they were interested in history in a way that they were,” Harness said.
Harness said museum staff are hoping to incorporate more “project based” internships, including at the high school level. More information about the digitizing project is available on the Pratt Museum website.
