CHM cataloging and metadata librarian Gretchen Neidhardt explains how the Museum is undertaking the monumental task of digitizing the last of its paper card catalog for 6,000 small manuscript collections. The Chicago History Museum is excited to utilize an IMLS Museums for America grant to fund the digitization of our final batch of manuscript collection More
Inside the Collection is a video series that invites you into the Chicago History Museum’s storage spaces to explore unusual, interesting artifacts from our vast collection. In this installment, senior collection manager Britta Keller Arendt shows us a pair of Inuit snow goggles, eye protection crafted and worn by the native peoples of Alaska and More
To kick off Monday Night Nitrates, our new weekly photograph series, M. Alison Eisendrath, CHM’s Andrew W. Mellon Director of Collections, describes the effort to assess, preserve, and digitize our collection of approximately 35,000 nitrate negatives. In 1889, the Eastman Kodak Company introduced the first commercially available cellulose nitrate film as an alternative to the more More
CHM archives intern Hannah Radeke worked with senior archivist Dana Lamparello this past summer to cull duplicative images from the photography collection of Edward H. Weiss, a world-renowned, Chicago-based artist and ad man. Edward Huhner Weiss was a man of many interests. Best known for his large-scale portraits of notable figures both within Chicago and beyond, More
CHM archives and manuscripts intern Matthew Norgard worked with archivist Julie Wroblewski this past summer to process the papers of the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights (CCDBR). In this blog post, he details what he learned about the CCDBR and activism in the city more broadly. Grassroots organizing is once again in More