Museum of New Mexico Foundation (Museum of Indian Arts and Culture)

The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture will improve storage conditions for its whole vessel and specialty ceramic collections, and make them more accessible for research, exhibits, and public programs. The museum staff will work with a conservator and subject area consultants to move more than 6,000 objects to centralized storage in a new archaeological repository at the Center for New Mexico Archeology. The objects will be placed in open storage on newly purchased high-density mobile shelving. The move will provide an opportunity to capture digital images of the artifacts and to update information in the museum's catalog records. The project team will move artifacts previously identified as NAGPRA-sensitive funerary objects into a specially designated vault in the new repository. The museum will link the digitized images to object catalog records and make them available online, facilitating access and reducing the need to physically handle the objects.