The Haines Sheldon Museum was one of four museums in Alaska to receive a fall grant from Museums Alaska.

The Sheldon Museum received $14,670, the most of any recipient, for its continuing collections accessibility project.

Museum director Helen Alten said the money will pay for a staff member to inventory more than 3,400 paper archive materials.

“We’ve got four months for an archivist to do an inventory for the collection, develop a plan of action and start working on the most critical areas of the archive collection,” Alten said. “I think people don’t realize what we hold in terms of archives. We have some really amazing materials: personal letters, diaries and ships’ logs.”

The museum has received the grant nearly twice a year for the past six years, but this grant is the largest. The money has paid for an inventory of the entire collection, such as books, shipwreck artifacts, clothing, quilts, beadwork, carvings, puppets and other objects. Staff has also been able to digitize much of the museum’s audiovisual collection. The museum’s iPads exhibit films depicting Haines history, a project paid by past grants.

“We’ve done an inventory of the whole physical collection, the objects, the library, the books,” Alten said. “We have never done an inventory of the documents, which is what the archives is. Our collection has in our database 3,470 archives, file folders or paper materials, 2,715 books, 11,253 photographs and 4,510 objects.”

The museum estimates 87 feet of new archives material needs to be processed and inventoried. This includes papers from the Ward, Haas, and Harrell families.

Alten said one of the museum’s goals, as a result of the inventory process, will be to provide a searchable database on the museum’s website to aid in research and general curiosity. “We’re getting it to a point where we can put stuff online, at least lists of what we hold, so people can do their research or prepare for their research,” Alten said.

The museum’s research library and archives is open from 12 to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

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