Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives

The Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives will stabilize a collection of negatives and photographs documenting 40 years of Washington, DC public school history. The museum will also digitize a portion of the collection as a pilot project to plan for the digitization of its entire collection. Informed by a Collections Assessment for Preservation (CAP) report, the museum will work with collections and digitization consultants, high school interns, and graduate students to rehouse, accession, transcribe, scan, and digitize images, as well as develop collection metadata. The digitization consultant will develop a digitization plan for the museum and provide training opportunities for the project team. The project will create a framework for building the museum’s digital collections database and making its collections more widely accessible as an example of collecting and preserving the history of an urban public school system.