So I’ve got good news and bad news. The good? There are SO MANY museums that are putting their costume collections online — since my last update to the Real Women’s Clothing guide, there’s been the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Colonial Williamsburg, and Centre de Documentació i Museu Tèxtil de Terrassa, among I’m sure many others. The bad? There’s just no way I can keep up with adding and maintaining that many individual links. Seriously — run some searches in some of these new databases, there are hundreds if not thousands of individual items that I would need to add/maintain. Given that the last real update to the Real Women’s Clothing guide was in November 2008, I think it’s time to give up the ghost.
Instead, I have created a directory of Digital Collections of Extant Costumes, which includes both collection databases and static webpages with images of historic costume. This will be much more easily updated, and I can now include museums/collections that don’t include women, or go outside of the date range, of the previous Real Women’s Clothing guide. I tried to include searching instructions where I thought they would be needed, especially with non-English language sites. If you know of any museums that I’ve missed, please let me know!
I will leave the old version of the Real Women’s Clothing guide up, as I know many people find it useful… but I won’t be updating it anymore. (I’ll add redirects off that site to the new directory very soon).
And a fair offer, as I always said I would do this: if there is someone who is CRAZY enough to want to take over updating/adding to the Real Women’s Clothing guide in its previous incarnation on your own website, I will happily pass that on to you — but we should talk so you get an idea of how much work you’re signing up for!
That makes good sense to me! You’ve been a trooper putting this kind of resource together for so long 🙂
That’s a great idea! Thanks for all your effort at putting together the old site and coming up with a way to make it work in a new format. You rock!
Even just the list of online collection databases will be a great resource, and the original RWCG will remain a pretty useful.
I think links to databases are even better… everyone can search for whatever their heart desires that way.
I SO wish the Um?lecko-pr?myslové muzeum in Prague put up their collections online. I remember they had some really pretty pieces… like a collection of wedding dresses over the course of approximatelly 100 years, from late Victorian/Edwardian to modern.
Do you think it would be possible to do this as a wiki? I love your database. I’ve found it so incredibly useful for so many years. You have helped me with my Oregon Trail and Civil War living history, and I costumed a production of “Hedda Gabler” based on images from your database. I would love to help. I can’t do it all but I can help.
I love the RWCG so much, it’s been phenomenally useful. It’s also understandably impossible to keep cataloging so many images in that way… A wiki might be possible if there was a small bevy of people to work on one era at a time, perhaps. I could help contribute to that. Otherwise the collection list is great and I’m glad you put that up.
Kathryn & Mae — a wiki could be an interesting way to do it, although what I’ve found is that it’s not just adding the links — it’s maintaining them. You’d be surprised how often links go dead b/c museums have redone their site. So we’d need people interested in going back through the listings and rechecking/refinding listings periodically too!