Mellon Archives Project

In June 2000, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the Philadelphia Museum of Art a four-year grant to enhance scholarly access to several historically significant manuscript and record collections through an integrated program of processing, database development, digitization, and encoding for Internet distribution. During the course of the grant term from November 2000 to November 2004, project staff provided optimal access to these materials by fully arranging and describing the materials, and publishing a finding aid (descriptive inventory) to each collection according to current archival standards. Project staff utilized Encoded Archival Description (EAD) to produce encoded finding aids for the collections, which are available through the Museum’s website and through the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN). A second objective of the project was to identify photographs and documents to be digitized and/or reformatted for conservation from the collections. Project staff relied on the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) to deliver digital surrogates and related metadata to researchers on the Museum’s website.