The electronic catalog of museum artifacts, manuscripts, books, photographs, and digital collections can now be accessed online: www.cherokeemuseum.org OR https://cherokeemuseum.pastperfect-online.com . This includes more than 20,000 records which can be easily searched to determine the museum’s holdings. Many records have photographs attached. This twelve-year effort has been supported by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Cherokee Preservation Foundation, National Park Service, and the Museum of the Cherokee Indian.
“We are proud to make this step, because this makes information on the Cherokees available in a form that people can search and can use,” said Ken Blankenship, Executive Director.
This ambitious project was conceived in 1997 when Blankenship talked with the director of the new National Museum of the American Indian, Richard West. NMAI was encouraging tribal museums to help create a “cyberspace” museum of American Indian culture by putting their collections online. The project evolved through more than ten years of fundraising, new developments in software, and finally the construction of a new building to house a public reading room and education activities.
The electronic catalog is a work in progress, but currently holds the following information. More than 5,000 books and periodicals in the Archives have been catalogued with Library of Congress information. More than 1300 photographs in the museum collection have been catalogued and can be viewed as thumbnails. Thousands of manuscript items in the Archives have been catalogued, along with video, audio, and microfilm.
Source: Museum of the Cherokee Indian
