Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is an institution with a storied past and impressive collections, boasting over 450,000 works of art housed in a city block-spanning granite building that combines the original 1907 neoclassical structure with a number of wings and additions designed by architects including I.M. Pei, Foster + Partners (London), and Hugh Stubbins, who also designed UMass Amherst’s Southwest Residential Complex. The collections housed within its numerous galleries offer a diverse range of objects, spanning from ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Nubian art, to abstract modern sculpture, to a dizzying array of decorative arts and material culture from

Launched in February 2020, Mapping the Gay Guides is an innovative digital history project focused on identifying and mapping the locations listed in the Bob Damron Address Books, a series of travel guides aimed primarily at gay and queer men (and, later to a certain extent, lesbians) that was first published in 1964, and still in publication today. Of particular interest to the project are those guides capturing the period spanning 1964-1980, many of whose listings By associating geographical coordinates with each of these locations, the project aims to “correct our cultural erasure of historical geography,” turning these “incredible textual

At first glance, publicly crowdsourced projects, whether in the humanities or sciences, may not seem that novel in concept – especially when one considers the inherently collaborative & social nature of so many corners of the internet. But as initiatives removed from the hierarchy and controlled access of formal collections in the library, archive, & museum world, they do represent a radical departure from conventional practice and, to some of the more entrenched members of the LAM establishment, “best practices”. While the realities of 2020 may have thrown out many of these collections access best practices, crowdsourcing represents a potential