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Images of the Indian Peoples of the Northern Great Plains

This IMLS project will be a model program of cooperation between several libraries and a museum. Smaller universities and colleges usually do not have the resources available that a museum does, for example, a Photo Curator with expertise in preservation and organization of images. On the other hand, museums often lack the library and information technology expertise that are usually available on a university campus. Through cooperation,the strengths of personnel at each partner institution will be combined to create a database of images of Native Americans.

The Images Project will broaden access to new constituencies because students, researchers, and the general public will have direct access to important primary source material on the Plains Indian cultures currently only available otherwise by travel to Montana.

Images will be digitized and drawn from the library collections of three of the Montana State University campuses (Bozeman, Billings, and Havre), The Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, and Little Big Horn College in Crow Agency, Montana. The applicant partnership will be between Montana State University Libraries and The Museum of the Rockies.

A digital collection will be created in consultation with Native Americans, educators, librarians, and historians. The overall organization of the database will be by tribe and all will be represented: Crow, Cheyenne, Blackfeet, Salish (Flathead), Kutenai, Chippewa-Cree, Gros Ventres (Atsina), and Assiniboine. The collection will consist primarily of images, but will include some text to give context. Most of the images are photographs, but there are also stereographs, ledger drawings, and other sketches.

The items will be digitized at each site, indexed using SGML and then placed on a server located and maintained at Montana State University-Bozeman. Continued Web access will be provided by the university through its Information Technology Center (ITC).

Phase two of the project will revolve around the annual Professional Development Institute for Tribal College Librarians in 1999. Workshops will be conducted for all tribal college participants so that the model can be more widely implemented and then used at other remote sites. Tribal colleges usually have a museum/archives in addition to a library. The project developed in Bozeman and tested at Little Big Horn will be a useful model for these smaller colleges.

The collaboration between a museum and libraries will take advantage of expertise at each institution. It will further demonstrate that the technologies employed can be used at a wide range of institutions to process images, while maintaining the database at a central location staffed for its continuing maintenance. While many large universities are creating SGML databases of images, it is unclear if this is a workable model to be used at smaller campuses and museums. The project will investigate whether SGML is a reasonable solution for institutions without SGML expertise on staff or a great deal of money. At all times, the project will remain flexible as to technological solutions, and not lock in on just one technology. The IMLS model will endeavor to be as broad-based as possible so that it is easily replicable in other settings.

Updated 1/7/99