State Museum Receives 250k IMLS Museums for America Grant

Grant funds will support staffing to digitize nearly 5,000 fossils from the museum's Natural History Collection

The South Carolina State Museum has been awarded a fourth Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Museums for America grant to continue digitizing its collection of more than 1.1 million specimens, objects, and artwork. The $250,000 grant will support staffing to photograph important pieces in the museum’s Natural History collection.

“This funding is vital in helping the State Museum achieve the goals of our Reimagine the Experience (RTE) campaign,” says State Museum Executive Director, Amy Bartow-Melia. “This not only expands our ability to increase accessibility to the museum’s collection through our online collections search database that launched last fall, but it will also help us to better prepare engaging exhibitions and on-site experiences for our guests.”

The newly awarded fourth IMLS grant will fund the digitization of 5,000 fossils in the museum’s Natural History Collection. The Natural History Collection includes the remains of plants and animals that document roughly 520 million years of life in South Carolina. This new project will also be the first time the museum’s Collections Digitization team will utilize 3-D scanning technology in the digitization process.

“The vast majority of our Natural History Collection currently remains in storage,” says South Carolina State Museum Curator of Natural History, Dave Cicimurri. “This funding creates an exciting opportunity for us to make these important pieces of our state’s ancient past accessible online for researchers, students and people across the world to explore.”

Since 2018, the museum’s Collections Digitization team has worked to create an extensive digital database for the museum’s collection. The first IMLS grant supported the digitization of the museum’s Art collection, which included over 4,400 works of art, pottery, basketry, and quilts. The second grant focused on objects in the military and housewares collection. Additionally, the third grant included inventorying over 3,500 objects within the museum’s Science and Technology collection and photographing nearly 2,000 objects currently on view in the museum’s exhibition galleries.

Thanks to support from the IMLS Museums for America program, the South Carolina State Museum continues to enhance its digital capabilities, ensuring broader access to the museum’s extensive collections. To date, the museum’s Collections Digitization team has inventoried over 20,000 items and taken more than 35,000 photographs.