Oakland Museum of California

The Oakland Museum of California seeks to survey representative content from eight currently inaccessible photographic collections to take steps to preserve the collections and make them more accessible to the public. The museum will assess each collection's general state of preservation for later conservation intervention, provide basic rehousing for stabilization, segregate any collections at high risk for deterioration, digitize representative sample images from each collection, and create an online finding aid for each collection to enable ongoing access to these materials by staff, researchers, and the public. These collections represent the highest priority of the museum's strategic plan to increase access for public engagement. The uncatalogued collections include well over 1,000,000 negatives, prints, and other archival material that are essentially inaccessible to staff or the public and beginning to exhibit indications of deterioration. This project will provide a significant increase in publicly accessible collection information about museum objects and associated content, and will raise the visibility of these collections.