Collections Update

What’s the Latest on the Museum’s Photograph and Manuscript Collections?

BY JOHN M. COSKI

The Museum of the Confederacy’s valuable manuscripts in their new home at Richmond’s Virginia Historical Society, your wait may be over. If you wish to use the Museum’s collection of photographs for research or publication… well, then, your wish is our command.

In 2014, the American Civil War Museum and the Virginia Historical Society (since renamed the Virginia Museum of History and Culture or VMHC) entered into a licensing agreement by which the VMHC would digitize the Museum of the Confederacy photo collections and handle all requests for digital images. By the same agreement, the Museum of the Confederacy’s manuscript collections moved to the VMHC, where the VMHC will make them available in its library reading room.

Since then the VMHC project staff has made much progress with what are known formally as the CMLS collections – so named because the Museum of the Confederacy’s parent corporation, the Confederate Memorial Literary Society (CMLS), remains their legal owner.

The photo collections are fully digitized and available for viewing on the VMHC website. Go to www.virginiahistory. org/collections and look for the link to “Learn More about the Confederate Memorial Literary Society collections.”

There you can find out how to search for specific images and how to make on-line orders of images for personal use or publication.

The work of making the vast CMLS manuscript collection available is a years-long process. It entails giving the simply inventoried CMLS collections the kind of deep, descriptive cataloging that has made the VMHC one of the nation’s outstanding manuscript repositories. The VMHC on-line catalog entries offer voluminous details about the documents in each collection.

virginiahistory.org/collections

Many of the larger and more heavily-used CMLS collections series are now available in the VMHC catalog. These include soldier letters and diaries; records of Confederate hospitals, surgeons, and medical personnel, Confederate naval vessels and officers, and Confederate monument and memorial associations; and documents relating to African Americans, women, and families.

To find those collections in the VMHC catalog, go to www.virginiahistory.org and click on “Search the Collections” and then “Library catalog.” To see all the CMLS collections in the catalog, you can filter your search by going to the Library catalog page and clicking on “Popular Searches” and then <select saved search> to find “Confederate Memorial Literary Society Manuscript Collections.”

Selective digitizations of the manuscript is a very timeconsuming process and is a lower priority than the thorough cataloging of the collection. A few collections have been digitized and are available through the VMHC website. If any part of a collection has been digitized, you will see an “Attachment” link at the bottom of the catalog entry.

CMLS collections not yet appearing in the on-line catalog may be available for research. Scroll to the bottom of the “Search the Collections” page, click on “contact our research staff” and either fill in the form or send an email request to the reference@virginiahistory.org email address.

John M. Coski is the Museum’s Historian and former Library Director.