Hello,

I am writing to introduce you to my newly-launched blog on American material culture,

www.themeaningsofthings.org/wordpress. Please take a look at it.

Each week, I will be featuring a different object along with an interpretive essay that I write.

Among other things, I hope to showcase museum objects that are not available to the public on account of their being kept in storage (under the category “Hidden Museum Treasures.”) I’d like to provide museums with an alternative venue in which to display, virtually, objects they cannot show inside their walls.

I hope I may interest some of you in participating in my project.

Needless to say, all museums will be fully credited for the use of images of their objects, and a link to the museum website included in the related essay.

Besides writing the essays myself, I am open to having guest editors submit essays as well. If I am the author of the essay relating to a museum object, I will submit my essay to the institution’s curator prior to its publication on my blog, for any corrections or editorial suggestions.

I realize that what I am proposing is far more simply said than done; as a former museum curator myself, I am aware that even small museums may have hundreds, if not thousands of objects in storage, of great variety, and that catalogs can be labyrinthine in their complexity. I know that rights and reproductions issues can also be problematic.

This letter is simply to elicit interest. If you are interested in taking part in this project, please contact me, and then we can work towards a way in which I can either search your collections database, or take suggestions for topics based upon your collections, or in some other way to work together. I live in the East Coast tristate metropolitan area and often travel to attend conferences, so that direct meetings are possible in many cases.

I want my blog to be accessible to a non-academic audience, but am also interested in its use a teaching tool. I would value feedback on this point, as well.

Yours in the spirit of cooperative ventures,

Hillary Murtha, Ph.D

American history and material culture

Hmurtha@udel.edu