Oregon Historical Society Launches New Online Museum Collection Portal

NOTE: This article is not one of the usual articles in this newsletter. It doesn’t discuss genealogy, history, DNA, or legal events. However, it is about a topic that I believe is loosely related: a major museum has released a publicly-accessible catalog of its holdings.

If you have ancestors from Oregon or any other interest in Oregon’s history, you will probably find the Oregon Historical Society’s new Museum Collection Portal to be of interest to you.

The Oregon Historical Society has announced the launch of its Museum Collection Portal (museumcollection.ohs.org) — a public, online database highlighting the incredible objects in the museum’s care.

OHS’s museum preserves over 75,000 objects that document the history of the region, which includes clothing and textiles, Native American belongings, artworks, vehicles, equipment, and everyday items. At launch, the Portal provides access to the records for over 10,000 of these objects, with new records being added regularly.

Dinner Time on the Rifle Range

Users can connect to these historical objects by searching by name, description, maker, or date(s). Pre-filtered searches are another great way to explore the Portal, and users can experience OHS’s collections through broad subjects such as the Oregon Trail, the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, or quilts. Users can also browse recent acquisitions to the museum collection as well as learn more about the over 350 objects on view in OHS’s permanent exhibition, Experience Oregon. Each object record includes an image of the object along with its provenance — the history of the object’s ownership.

You can learn a lot more about the Museum Collection Portal in an article in the KTVZ web site at: https://ktvz.com/community/2022/01/25/oregon-historical-society-launches-new-online-museum-collection-portal/.