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By Elee Wood, Public Scholar of Museums, Families, and Learning.
The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis recently received a Museums for America grant of $102,370 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to create The Ryan White Letters project. Through this digital learning project, the museum will build upon its groundbreaking and successful permanent exhibit, The Power of Children: Making a Difference, by creating a series of digital educational programs and a research archive using a unique letter collection compiled by Ryan White, the Indiana teenager who became internationally known in the early 1980s when he contracted HIV/AIDS. This opportunity to interact with the letters in The Children's Museum's collection provides students, families, and researchers insight on social and cultural topics in the 1980s and today, such as the role of education and tolerance in changing cultural norms, all highlighting the power that a child has to make an impact and leave a lasting legacy on the world.
The Ryan White Letters are currently stored in the museum’s collection archive, and public access is currently limited to the few letters that have been included in permanent and traveling exhibits. They have also been used in limited ways by graduate students conducting research projects related to Ryan’s life. While some examination of the letters has been conducted, the content has yet to be transcribed and organized into an accessible system for public research and education. Only a handful of AIDS archives exist today, and none focus on a child’s perspective, making this a unique resource for anyone with an interest in the topic of AIDS, social change, and the experience of children. The project idea came from Nancy Brown, a PhD student in History at Purdue. Nancy had been visiting the museum to look through the archives for her dissertation work. She suggested that a searchable, online archive would make the letters more accessible to all kinds of researchers and more importantly, would be a great asset for kids to have access to. Her idea sparked a team from the museum to develop the project. The IUPUI Center for Digital Scholarship is collaborating with the museum's team to help scan and digitize the letters and eventually host them online.
As part of the project the museum will create classroom and exhibit modules that will engage student and family audiences in the transcription process. Through this activity, public audiences will be able to read and transcribe the letters in the online module, which will eventually become searchable transcriptions to the digital archive. Through these experiences participants will be able to learn the process of using primary source materials to do research, while building an awareness of the legacy of Ryan White and his connection to current societal issues in the US.
Did you write a letter to Ryan White when you were younger? We’d love to hear from you! If you wrote a letter or postcard, or sent a picture to Ryan White, please send a message to tcmarchives@childrensmuseum.org and include your name, contact information, and anything you remember about what you sent to Ryan. We will contact you to be a continuing part of the project.
You can learn more about the Ryan White Letters project in our press release.
This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, grant number MA-10-16-0092-16.
