Textile Collections

Collections of textiles—historic costume quilts needlework samplers and the like—have benefited greatly from the digital turn in museum and archival work. Both institutional online repositories and collections-based social media sites have fostered unprecedented access to textile collections that have traditionally been marginalized in museums. How can curators interpreters and collections managers make best use of these new opportunities? To answer this question the author worked with sites including the Great Lakes Quilt Center at the Michigan State University Museum the Design Center at Philadelphia University the International Quilt Study Center and Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the WGBH Boston Media Library and Archives as well as user-curated social sites online such as Tumblr and Polyvore to create four compelling case studies on the preservation access curation and interpretation of textile objects.