Textile Collections

Preservation, Access, Curation, and Interpretation in the Digital Age

Amanda Grace Sikarskie

Collections of textiles—historic costume, quilts, needlework samplers, and the like—have benefited greatly from the digital turn in museum and archival work. Both institutional online repositories and collections-based social media sites have fostered unprecedented access to textile collections that have traditionally been marginalized in museums. How can curators, interpreters, and collections managers make best use of these new opportunities?

To answer this question, the author worked with sites including the Great Lakes Quilt Center at the Michigan State University Museum, the Design Center at Philadelphia University, the International Quilt Study Center and Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the WGBH Boston Media Library and Archives, as well as user-curated social sites online such as Tumblr and Polyvore, to create four compelling case studies on the preservation, access, curation, and interpretation of textile objects.

The book explores:

The nature of digital material culture.
The role of audience participation versus curatorial authority online.
Audience-friendly collections metadata and tagging.
Visual, rather than text-based, searching and cataloging.
The legality of ownership and access of museum collections online.
Gender equity in museums and archives.

This book is essential reading for anyone who cares for, collects, exhibits, or interprets historic costume or textile collections, but its broad implications for the future of museum work make it relevant for anyone with an interest in museum work online. And because the focus of this volume is theory and praxis, rather than specific technologies that are likely to become obsolete, it will be staple on your bookshelf for years to come.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / AASLH

Pages: 178 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4422-6364-2 • Hardback • April 2016 • $123.00 • (£95.00)

978-1-4422-6365-9 • Paperback • April 2016 • $58.00 • (£45.00)

978-1-4422-6366-6 • eBook • April 2016 • $55.00 • (£42.00)

Series: American Association for State and Local History

Subjects: Business & Economics / Museum Administration & Museology

Textile Collections

Preservation, Access, Curation, and Interpretation in the Digital Age

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Collections of textiles—historic costume, quilts, needlework samplers, and the like—have benefited greatly from the digital turn in museum and archival work. Both institutional online repositories and collections-based social media sites have fostered unprecedented access to textile collections that have traditionally been marginalized in museums. How can curators, interpreters, and collections managers make best use of these new opportunities?

To answer this question, the author worked with sites including the Great Lakes Quilt Center at the Michigan State University Museum, the Design Center at Philadelphia University, the International Quilt Study Center and Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the WGBH Boston Media Library and Archives, as well as user-curated social sites online such as Tumblr and Polyvore, to create four compelling case studies on the preservation, access, curation, and interpretation of textile objects.

The book explores:
- The nature of digital material culture.
- The role of audience participation versus curatorial authority online.
- Audience-friendly collections metadata and tagging.
- Visual, rather than text-based, searching and cataloging.
- The legality of ownership and access of museum collections online.
- Gender equity in museums and archives.
This book is essential reading for anyone who cares for, collects, exhibits, or interprets historic costume or textile collections, but its broad implications for the future of museum work make it relevant for anyone with an interest in museum work online. And because the focus of this volume is theory and praxis, rather than specific technologies that are likely to become obsolete, it will be staple on your bookshelf for years to come.

Details

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / AASLH

Pages: 178 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4422-6364-2 • Hardback • April 2016 • $123.00 • (£95.00)

978-1-4422-6365-9 • Paperback • April 2016 • $58.00 • (£45.00)

978-1-4422-6366-6 • eBook • April 2016 • $55.00 • (£42.00)

Series: American Association for State and Local History

Subjects: Business & Economics / Museum Administration & Museology

Author

Amanda Grace Sikarskie is a textile historian, educator, museum practitioner, and blogger whose work investigates material culture—especially textiles—in the digital age. Since receiving her Ph.D. in American Studies in 2011 from Michigan State University, she has taught undergraduate and graduate-level courses at Michigan State University and Western Michigan University, including Museum Technology, Museum Studies, Popular Art & Architecture in America, Historic Preservation, and Cultural Resource Management. Dr. Sikarskie also holds graduate certificates in Museum Studies (2008) and Humanities Computing (2005).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Ada Lovelace and Weaving the Digital
Chapter One: Preservation
Chapter Two: Access
Chapter Three: Curation
Chapter Four: Interpretation

Post-script: Meditations on Kate Middleton’s Wedding Dress
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Reviews

"Textile Collections: Preservation, Access, Curation and Interpretation in a Digital Age will delight and intrigue the textile archive specialist and non-specialist alike. Sikarskie fluidly merges pop culture with curatorial best practice, raising intriguing and provocative possibilities of the digital age in the curation and interpretation of textile collections."

— Sarah Scatturo, Conservator, The Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

“Anyone responsible for collections of historic or ethnic dress and textiles will find Textile Collections both useful and thought-provoking. Amanda Sikarskie offers specific ways more audiences might be engaged with historic dress and textiles. She describes examples of digital technologies and social networking websites that are being employed by youth to informally curate fashion collections and suggests ways museum professionals might adapt these ideas. If you have never heard of or visited the social networking website Tumblr or the social commerce website Polyvore, I guarantee you will want to explore them after you read her chapter on curation. Sikarskie not only urges historians, curators and collections managers responsible for historic textiles and dress to move beyond information sharing and to begin collaborating with their audiences, she shows them how they might do so."
— Patricia Cox Crews, Emeritus Professor of Textiles, Universiry of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Founding Director Emeritus, International Quilt Study Center & Museum