With $400,000 in grants from the Getty Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the University Art Museum at UCSB is now able to launch pilot projects to organize and digitize some of the individual collections that constitute its vast Architecture and Design Collection, museum officials report.

The museum’s internationally recognized architectural archive includes more than 850,000 original drawings as well as specifications, office correspondence, manuscript material, historic photographs, scrapbooks, sketchbooks, and three-dimensional objects. Founded in 1963, the total archive contains an estimated 110 individual collections, which represent the work of more than 350 designers from 1890 to the present, according to Kurt Helfrich, curator of the architecture collection.

The UAM recently received $250,000 from the Getty Foundation and $150,000 from the IMLS through its Museums for America program. “These grants, which recognize the caliber of the collections, will help us markedly expand access through the Internet” to the whole archive, said Kathryn Kanjo, director of the museum.

Helfrich explained that while the separate collections are mostly cataloged, there are some that still await cataloging, including the papers of the late architectural historian David Gebhard, who founded the archive. “The IMLS will fund an expert to digitize two of our oldest collections, setting standards of organization that advances in technology will allow us to continue in-house,” he said.

With the Getty grant, two more UAM staff will be added, Helfrich continued, “to create finding aids for our most important 15 collections,” including the Gebhard papers. Updated collection descriptions and cross-referencing will blaze the technical path for future in-house organizing once funding ends for the projects.