Tami Blog #8: The Conner Prairie Museum Textile Collection

Textiles were once an important element in American homes. As The Conner Prairie Museum Textile Collection’s home page states, “having enough textiles to keep warm during cold winter nights could mean the difference between life and death.” The textiles in this digital collection are preserved and housed at the Conner Prairie Living Museum in Fishers, Indiana. Conner Prairie was donated to the Quaker liberal arts school, Earlham College, by Ruth and Eli Lilly in the early 1960s. The museum eventually became independent of the college and preserves the historic William Conner home and recreates 19^th century life in Indiana on the White River. The textile collection was founded in the 1940s by the Lillys.

Collection Principles

This collection contains 41 digitized images of quilts, samplers, and coverlets. While the jpegs of the textiles are quite beautiful, the site itself has a few problems and was irritating and frustrating to use. There was no discernable “about this collection” section so the process taken to digitize the collection is unknown. In addition, there is no information indicating whether this is the complete collection maintained at Conner Prairie or why this particular collection was chosen for digitization. A creation date of March 19, 2008 is found on the bottom of the collection’s home page.

Object Characteristics

Each full object jpeg can be zoomed in or out to provide quite a bit of detail. In addition, detailed jpegs are provided that are crisp, clean, and zoomed in so tight as to provide easy viewing of individual stitches and weaves. The site maintains the usual ContentDM functionality with the ability to add the object to a Favorites folder, compare and rotate objects, and enlarge the sections you particularly want to view.

Metadata

This collection provides very good metadata. Once you have clicked on the textile image and are viewing the enlarged versions, you can click “Go” next to the words “document description” and you are provided with the metadata for that object. The metadata is very extensive and includes such criteria as title, object ID, description, creator, date creator, type, condition of the object, notes from the curator, digital date, and digital specifications. The descriptors for each object can then be clicked on to bring up more items with these same characteristics. Even the individual words in the descriptive text can be clicked to single out items with that particular quality.

The “advanced search” feature of the site allows you to search across as many of the Indiana digital collections as you like. There are 43 of them, ranging in topic from an art journal entitled Umbrella 1978-2005 to the Crispus Attucks Collection. The default setting has all of the collections checked but “select all” and “clear all” buttons are provided.

Intended Audience

This collection would be useful to researchers of early American history and textiles. I believe that the general public would find this site interesting due to the extensive amount of metadata provided. The notes from the curator are especially revealing. The university also provided a link to a document entitled “Quilts Across Cultures and for Many Reasons,” which is essentially a teaching aid, that can be accessed through the home page of the collection.