The Quilt Index

The Quilt Index is a groundbreaking digital collection that incorporates a wide variety of sources and information on quilts, quiltmakers and quiltmaking, and a central resource for scholars, students and educators. It serves as a model for online access to material-specific collections. Currently featuring around 20,000 quilts, it will soon contain digital images and history on more than 50,000 quilts. Contributors from 25 museums, libraries, universities and state documentation projects are already participating in this unmatched virtual collection. Fully funded to grow and expand through 2010, the Quilt Index is now poised to become one of the largest test beds for digital humanities and cultural heritage resources on-line. Online access allows these items to be viewed and studied without harming the often-fragile originals.

The Quilt Index database integrates objects contributed from many institutions (actual digitized objects as images or text, not just bibliographic records). Contributors to the Quilt Index come from across the country; and additional potential partners are located in every state in the US and internationally. The Quilt Index will significantly enrich its impact in 2009 by diversifying its presentation of object types to include ephemera such as journals, diaries, quilt patterns, newspaper columns, and quilt catalogs. At the same time the Quilt Index is advancing networking and presentation tools, including a wiki which went live in 2008 and a social networking tool to be implemented in 2009, to allow broad public participation, as well as carefully curated galleries, essays, and teaching resources drawn from The Quilt Index and across the web.