WCMA’s Mellon Digital Project supports and amplifies the use of WCMA’s collections. Funded by the Mellon Foundation with a three-year grant, this constellation of initiatives promotes WCMA’s collection as an open, accessible resource for teaching, learning, and creative expression.

Over the course of the project, the museum will develop a digital platform that makes visible the many ways WCMA’s collections are used by faculty, students, and the broader community.

For instance, it will show how students use objects in unique thematic tours and how faculty teach on a range of subjects—from history and literature to botany, neuroscience, and statistics—in Object Lab and the Rose Object Classroom. The Mellon Project gathers the details of these interactions, adds them to the collection data, and shares them. Seeing how the collection is used adds new context and encourages new use.