Sursum! Digitizing Correspondence at the Elisabet Ney Museum

My favorite museum is a small castle in Hyde Park of Austin. Composed of Texan rough-hewn limestone and mountain cedar, the castle is actually the historic home and studio of the visionary 19th century German sculptor Elisabet Ney, built in 1892. After Ney’s passing in 1907, her closest friends in Austin preserved her studio and the art within its walls to establish the Elisabet Ney Museum, along with the Texas Fine Arts Association, which is recognized as the first organization to promote the pursuit of art-making within the state of Texas.

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My capstone project was dedicated to digitally preserving personal correspondence between Ney and other prominent figures in Texas history, as well as the history of the Elisabet Ney Museum itself. The digitization process involved curating a selection of letters from the museum’s archives, scanning the letters according to best practices, generating and encoding metadata, and creating a digital archive and various exhibitions using the Omeka platform. To serve as a basis for any future digitization work, I also developed an instruction manual with information regarding different types of metadata, how to use Omeka, and general standards for digital projects. All of these tasks were completed utilizing free software and platform plans, as well as the scanner the museum uses for daily operations.

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As the museum became affected by the closures associated with COVID-19 in Austin, the project became another way of furthering their mission of “enthusiastically celebrat[ing] [Ney’s] art, her history and her legacy through exhibitions,” engaging patrons in the digital sphere. Additionally, the project can serve as an educational resource to assist academic research and can be utilized within the K-12 curriculum.