Quilt Index

The Quilt Index is a searchable database featuring thousands of quilts from documentation projects, museums, libraries, and private collections, including:
* The Daughters of the American Revolution Museum
* Illinois Quilt Research Project quilts owned by Illinois State Museum
* The Kentucky Quilt Project at University of Louisville Archives and Records Center
* Michigan Quilt Project and Michigan State University Quilt Collection at Michigan State University Museum and Great Lakes Quilt Center
* The Mountain Heritage Center
* The Museum of the American Quilter’s Society
* Nebraska Quilt Project of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
* Quilts of Tennessee at Tennessee State Library and Archives
* Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum
* Texas Quilt Search and the Winedale Quilt Collection at the Center for American History, University of Texas at AustinThe Alliance for American Quilts (AAQ), MATRIX: Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online and Michigan State University Museum present the Quilt Index. MSU staff members lead project work, in consultation with AAQ, the Quilt Index Task Force, the Quilt Index Editorial Board, and representatives from each contributor.

The project has been supported by major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

Collections and Exhibits

Although the Quilt Index is not an actual museum site with in-house collections, the Index does have online exhibitions which highlight works in its digital collection. These include:
* Since Kentucky: Surveying State Quilts
* Mary Schafer: Quilter, Quilt Collector, and Quilt Historian
* Redwork: An American Textile TraditionThe overall collection includes quilts made from the early nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, representing a wide range of quilting styles, techniques, purposes and functions.

Users can browse for quilts based on their time period, location of origin, style, purpose, or by the collection in which they are now housed, or search for specific quilts by a variety of metadata, including pattern, quilter and identification number.

Wiki

The Quilt Index Wiki which became live in August 2008, is a collaborative, user-generated tool for quilters and quilt scholars featuring information about state and provincial quilt documentation projects, including publication lists and locations where records are housed. The wiki also provides an expanding directory of museums with quilt collections, and information about those collections. Users can also add information about local, regional and national oral history projects relating to quilt history to the wiki. The wiki is powered by MediaWiki software. Although not fully WYSIWYG, instructions for editing the wiki are available on its main page.

Conference Presentations

* Mary Worrall, “Textiles and Technology: The Quilt Index as a National Model for Online Thematic Collections,” Michigan Museums Association, Flint, MI, 2006.
* Mary Worrall, “Piecing History: Quilt Documentation and the Quilt Index,” Florida Museum of Natural History, Gainesville, FL, 2006.
* Marsha MacDowell, Mary Worrall, Patricia Crews, Jennifer Gilbert, Justine Richardson, “Stitching Data: The Quilt Index as a National Model for Online Thematic Collections Session,” American Association of Museums Annual Meeting and Expo, Boston, MA, April 29, 2006.

Publications

* Justine Richardson, Michael Fegan, Mark Kornbluh and Marsha MacDowell, "Bits & Bolts to Bits & Bytes: The Quilt Index Online Repository and Distributed Archival Management System." Museums and the Web Online Conference Proceedings, Washington, DC, April 2004. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2004/papers/richardson/richardson.html

Copyright Issues

Contributors to the Quilt Index retain copyright to their contributions of data (both text and images), and agree to permanently license these contributions to the Quilt Index to display on the website for educational purposes.

References

#The Quilt Index – About. http://www.quiltindex.org/about.php Retrieved 21 August 2008.

External Links

* The Quilt Index http://www.quiltindex.org
* The Quilt Index Wiki http://www.quiltindex.org/wiki