The Quilt Index

This project was piloted to present quilts and corresponding documentary information from multiple archives with multiple descriptive metadata needs to a broad scholarly and general public. Its first phase, which has thus far digitized over 1000 records from four different repositories, served to test REPOS storage, management, and delivery capacity, to develop metadata schema that meet both digital library and disciplinary needs, and to develop searching, sorting, and web presentation programming techniques that remain accurate across multiple, varying databases. Major new research issues to be pursued in the next phase include adding tens of thousands of new quilt records to the testbeds, experimenting and testing those proven programming techniques across massive new volumes of material, developing automated searching and ingestion processes for other existing databases of quilt materials, and developing user input, personalization options and pedagogical resources. A long-term research and outreach question for this project will be how to allow individual quilt makers or owners to contribute their quilts to the Index.