American Heritage Publishing

Beginning in 2007, American Heritage Publishing had created a large scale project called the National Portal. It is a massive, multiyear project to provide information on 4,000 historical sites, including easily searchable online access to digital images and descriptions of millions of artifacts housed in the collections of American museums, historical societies, National Parks, and other institutions across the country. The objects being added to this national “clearinghouse” include documents, photographs, paintings and artifacts, and run the gamut from military artifacts to artworks to the tools and mementos of everyday life. The Portal has been called a “transformative event” for the history community. At present, an extraordinarily large percentage of America’s preserved memory is hidden. In fact, 98% of history museums provide no Internet access whatsoever to their collections, and the few that do often include only a small percent of their holdings and use systems whose content cannot be read by search engines.