In 2005, the Terra Foundation and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art set out to create an unparalleled virtual repository of source material for the study of the visual arts of the United States. The Archives received a multi-million-dollar grant to develop a digitization program that would deliver free online access to some of the Archives’ most significant collections. This was the foundation’s first large-scale digital project that it supported. These funds enabled Archives staff to:
The foundation continued to fund multi-year grants to support ongoing digitization efforts and establish a new position, the Terra Foundation Project Manager for Online Scholarly and Educational Initiative, to anticipate and respond to new digital modes of learning, scholarship, curatorship, and reference, and engage and familiarize growing audiences worldwide with the Archives’ holdings.
The Terra Foundation Center for Digital Collections is a virtual repository of a cross-section of the Archives’ collections. Since 2005, over 270 archival collections have been digitized and posted online, comprising over 3 million images, and over 16,000 documents have been cataloged and made accessible online.
