How to celebrate President’s Day at Indiana’s only presidential site
Get a lesson in history and celebrate the presidents who came before us at the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site. It’s all part of LIVE! Presidents Day, and you’re invited!
Charles Hyde, CEO, Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site, tells us more:LIVE! Presidents Day
Today, President Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Monday is President’s day and what more authentic way to spend it than at Indiana’s only presidential site – Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site with an enactor Benjamin Harrison and first lady Caroline Harrison.
Something new the Presidential Site is kicking off this year – is the New Century eCollection initiative. This initiative will utilize innovative digital scanning technology and enhanced website resources to open the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site’s collection to the world – 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The funding will allow the Presidential Site to take its nationally-significant collection of 2D and 3D artifacts to the next level and share them in new and unexpected ways. It will also serve a vital purpose in preserving a presidential collection digitally, and will better leverage that collection to provide a transformative educational resource to the community.
“In the two centuries that the American republic has existed, only 44 people have served as the President of the United States. The individuals who have held this office deserve to have the legacy of their time in office available for scholarship and research. However, less than 10 percent of Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site’s collection is currently accessible to the public through our guided tours and special exhibits,” said Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site President & CEO Charlie Hyde. “This forward-looking initiative will open up an extraordinary range of original materials for exploration that have never been accessible in this way before. It will allow us as a museum to better preserve our 2D and 3D collection for future generations by visually documenting artifacts in their entirety, and open up new channels for the thrill of discovery. Few people realize the extraordinary depth and breadth of our collection, and because of Lilly Endowment’s grant, we’ll be able to help change that.”
Converting the collection to pixels and polygons is just the beginning. In partnership with IUPUI University Library and School of Informatics, the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site’s digital platform will allow users to interact with the scanned 2D and 3D collection for research, enrichment, academic study and classroom learning. The web platform will be designed to enable users to easily access and navigate the collection from a computer or mobile device, without needing to download an app or other special training or equipment. All content will be easily searchable.
“Technological innovation in the past decade has already established the increasing relevance of 2D digital collections, and the advent of publicly accessible 3D digital collections is upon us,” said Hyde. “Rather than the conventional museum approach of sinking large amounts of capital into a vast physical space that may only serve a local or regional audience, our new digital eCollection will be accessible to visitors, students, educators, researchers and the general public both here in Indiana and around the world. Schools and educators will have the opportunity to use this remarkable content for classroom enrichment through 3D printing and other digital technologies. This is the next big leap forward for museums.”
To learn more, visit www.presidentbenjaminharrison.org.