Grant to Fund UND Museum And Library Project

Notre Dame's Mendoza School To Offer New MSBA

The University of Notre Dame says a $455,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will help schools access museum and library holdings through a single online portal. The school says the effort could have a "transformational effect" on research and learning at Notre Dame and other universities.

The project aims to address an issue many universities face in enabling their collections and artifacts to be easily discovered online. While researchers and others can access locations at various locations, the school says those resources are not always available online, and when they are, don’t necessarily interact well with each other.

The Snite Museum of Art and the Hesburgh Libraries will help lead the effort to develop the Unified Preservation and Exhibition Platform to address the need. Developers say they will build on existing tools to create the software platform. The goal of the three-and-a-half-year collaboration aims to optimize the platform for cloud infrastructure, making more scalable and less costly than current systems on local networks.

Edward H. Arnold University Librarian Diane Parr Walker says the project will have "significant impact on pedagogical access, scholarly engagement and research outcomes at Notre Dame and elsewhere."