Rhode Island Historical Society

Purpose: Supporting Lifelong Learning The Rhode Island Historical Society (RIHS) will launch a collaborative museum-library cataloging project that will enable public access to the Society's diverse holdings through a single catalog program, accessed through public terminals and the RIHS Web site. The initial phase, the Rhode Island Family Heritage Project, is a two-year project to catalog the Society's holdings relating to family history. It will generate catalog records for family-related collections in all four collecting departments of the RIHS. As a finite subgroup of the nationally significant holdings at the RIHS, this project will serve as a well-defined means of launching the public-access catalog. This grant will be use to purchase a cataloging software package and convert existing electronic records. The society will match the grant with funds to implement the software and with staff time dedicated to processing and cataloging the collections in the project. This project is a major step toward the Society's primary strategic objective: a comprehensive online catalog of all of its collections, available to the public 24 hours a day, seven days a week.