Activate Your Collections with our New Online Resource Center
By Hannah Kirkpatrick
The Vermont Historical Society’s Active Collections Online Resource Center is now live!
This resource center serves as a companion to our Activating 21st Century Local History Training Program, and will be available to local historical societies and small museums in Vermont and beyond as they work to better use their collections.
The Activating 21st Century Local History Training Program works with local historical societies around Vermont to develop advanced skills by approaching their work within an “Active Collections” framework. This program helps volunteers and staff at local historical societies establish collections priorities, right-size their collections, and energize their community engagement strategies to help increase organizational sustainability and ensure the continuing preservation of local history.
We encourage local historical societies and museums to use the new guides and resources to implement Active Collections practices in their organizations. If you’re wondering where to start, use our resource guides. We’ve also included a glossary of terms that you may come across in your work with collections.
Members of our 2025 cohort are already using the resource center to access examples of tiered collections, one of our recent monthly meeting topics. Tiering is an accessible way for local historical societies and museums to think about how the objects in their collection fit their mission and serve the institution.
At our last cohort meeting, we each shared examples of objects in our collections and talked about how they might be tiered at each organization. You can find examples of tier charts, a template for tiering your collections, and an explanation of a grading system (like tiering, with different nuances) easily by using our resource filters to sort out all resources about tiering, as seen in the image below. This is just one of the many aspects of Active Collections work we are making accessible through the Online Resource Center.
We will continue to develop the resource center through 2026 as we work with our advisory committee, cohort members and other experts to add more resources that will help Vermont’s local historical societies to better use their collections. If you know of a book, guide, webinar, or other resource that illustrate principles of Active Collections, please share them with program.coordinator@vermonthistory.org.
This program is funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (Grant 21MP-256386-OMS-24). The resources chosen to populate this resource center exist in formats that are sustainable and accessible and are intended to outlast the two-year grant period. We hope that the Active Collections Online Resource Center will help local historical societies and small museums everywhere to make strides towards accessible, manageable, and usable collections.
