About
This website was born out the lack of a consolidated museum on the campus of Michigan Tech (we do have an excellent mineralogy museum, which itself has many fine instruments in their collection) and little chance of developing one or even the realistic possibility of a centralized storage facility to preserve instruments as departments got rid of them. It was also inspired by the handful of departmental display cases around campus with some lovely instruments, but which rarely had more than a descriptive card with each. We knew that a digital museum could solve both problems and have been pleased with the positive response across campus.
This website also offers a hands-on museum cataloging experience to our graduate and undergraduate students in the Industrial Heritage and Archeology program here. While not a perfect fit with the general goals of that MS/PhD program, IHSI does provide the real-world practices that heritage professionals can use in other venues later in their careers.