Here at the Arden Craft Shop Museum, we tell the story of the Ardens, which include the villages of Arden, Ardencroft, and Ardentown in Delaware. The Arden Craft Shop Museum seeks to educate visitors on the Ardens’ history as single-tax communities in addition to how the roles of theater, craftsmanship, art, and other aspects of life have affected the development of the Ardens as a close-knit community. In addition to a broad range of arts and craft objects, books, and manuscript documents, we have a growing photographic collection that documents life in the Ardens from the late 1800s to the present day. We want to share this photographic collection with scholars, the local community, and everyone else interested in the development of the Ardens. As a small museum with limited hours and staffing, we realized that providing digital access to our collections was an important part of our mission to educate and support our community.
We have found that Airtable provides a fantastic platform to organize and promote our photographic collection. In addition to creating a virtual gallery of our images, Airtable also allows us attach metadata to our collection, ensuring that important information on a photograph’s provenance or relationship to other collection items is not lost. We’ve been able to physically remove photographs from acidic and non-archival albums that threatened to damage them, knowing that we can preserve an intellectual arrangement.
One of our favorite features on Airtable are the subject tags, which allow users to search for people, places, and events of interest. With this, we’re not limited to traditional archival hierarchies, nor do we have to sort photographs into single categories. If users want to search for images of a particular building AND a notable person, they’re able to do this by using multiple filters. These subject tags have also allowed us to inventory the collection and easily search for images to use in an upcoming exhibit.
Airtable has provided the museum with a method to gain intellectual control over its photographic collection and has already made the collection accessible to a much wider audience. We look forward on continuing to expand our collection and the audience it reaches.
