Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library

Purpose: Sustaining Cultural Heritage Winterthur will undertake a multiyear project to recatalog its entire collection by curatorial discipline, using customized features provided by EMu software. In this part of the project, the museum will recatalog two of its most significant and frequently used collections-(1) furniture and (2) prints and paintings-both of which are important teaching tools. The museum has one of the most encyclopedic collections of American furniture made between 1630 and 1860. The print collection is one of the nation's 10 most significant collections of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American prints. The paintings collection includes portraits by virtually all of the major colonial and early national artists working in America. This grant will support cataloging of the furniture collection (approximately 3,500 pieces) and the prints and paintings collection (approximately 8,500 pieces) over the course of two years. The goal is to bring all records up to a classification of "good." Important descriptive information and references will be captured for each object, and each will be linked through Winterthur's Decorative Arts Photographic Collection to other objects by the same maker in the Winterthur collections and in the collections of other museums and private individuals. By providing this high-quality information on the Internet, the museum will exponentially increase the opportunities for education on topics related to early America.