WFU Creates Digital Artifact Database

Wake Forest University's Museum of Anthropology recently unveiled an online database of its entire collection, consisting of over 26,000 artifacts. You can search the collection by country to find objects from a particular region or culture. The database also allows users to search for a specific type of artifact across cultures. The project was made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and another recently awarded IMLS grant will allow the museum to expand the database to include archival records, such as photographs and maps.

UPenn to Digitize its Collection

Reuter’s reported that the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology will be digitizing the approximately 1 million artifacts in its collection and uploading them to the internet. This initiative will open up the collection, 95 percent of which is in storage, to scholars, researchers, and the general public. Perhaps the most famous pieces at PENN are those from an excavation of the royal tombs of Ur in southern Iraq that were part of the Sumerian civilization of approximately 2500 BC. The project will take about 3 years to complete, but it should be well worth the wait.