Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum

Purpose: Sustaining Cultural Heritage The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum is a regional leader in the preservation, documentation, and interpretation of the bay's cultural and material heritage. The museum's interpretive strategy is designed to encourage its constituencies to value and understand the heritage of the bay. The museum provides participatory exhibitions and related programs based on humanities scholarship, using collection materials to explore the relationship of people and the Chesapeake Bay over time. The museum also serves as a forum and resource for educators and the general public, to help them make enlightened choices in shaping the region's future. In this project, the museum will add to its digital repository the basic contextual information and digital images for almost 3,000 collection objects related to a new permanent introductory exhibit that will open in 2006, "Chesapeake Encounters." Once completed, these digital records will be an invaluable resource for museum staff in developing the exhibit, for future development and programming, and for docents and visitors who are interested in learning more about the museum's collection. This project is the centerpiece of the museum's efforts to retain complete intellectual control over its collections.