Gardens are good for your health, right? In order to prove this scientifically, the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens in Delray Beach, Fla., collaborated with the Lynn College of Nursing at Florida Atlantic University to create a program targeting a growing demographic: seniors over age 65 who are dealing with depression. Read more

To address two workforce training needs in Orlando, Fla.—technical skills and small business smarts—the Orange County Library System created the Grow Your Business program, which offered classroom and online courses in three languages. Read more

The USS Constitution Museum in Boston is opening a new exhibit, “All Hands on Deck: A Sailor’s Life in 1812” to bring to life day-to-day existence aboard the world’s oldest commissioned seafaring vessel. Read more

For decades, irreplaceable PTA scrapbooks, historical school photos, and roll books dating from 1926 to 1967 languished in a little-used room of Capitol Hill’s Stuart-Hobson Middle School. Rediscovered during the 2006 renovation of the school library, the archival treasures shed light on the ethnic and national origins of the families, parents’ occupations, and outbreaks of serious diseases such as scarlet fever. Read more

The Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii, will exhibit three newly-repaired 'ahu 'ula, sacred feather cloaks worn by male members of the Hawaiian ali’i, or chiefs, when it reopens the renovated Hawaiian Hall in August. Read more

Several years ago, Kansas City leaders decided to boost future economic growth by developing science and engineering skills in the area’s work force. There was a problem though: Kansas City’s workers and students weren’t very interested in science and engineering. Read more

The Civil Rights Digital Library by the University of Georgia in Athens gathers together many of the nation’s civil rights collections through its ambitious Web portal, while the Crossroads to Freedom Digital Library at Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee, uses its hometown collections to stimulate a community conversation on the impact of the civil rights movement on Memphians. Read more

Children feed alphabet letters to a talking baby dragon, drive a New York City fire truck, paint on a six-foot art wall, and crawl through a challenge course in PlayWorks™ at the Children's Museum of Manhattan (CMOM) in New York. Read more

The nomadic lifestyle of military families can take a toll on children’s education. To boost the school performance of 1,499 elementary school students at Fort Belvoir Military Post in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, three libraries in Fairfax County launched Project ExCELLS. Read more

For museums seeking greater and more engaged audiences for their online collections, steve.museum may offer some answers. The concept is simple: individuals contribute descriptions about the art (and other collection objects) on museum Web sites using the steve tagger. Read more

Five museums and five libraries have won the 2008 National Medal for Museum and Library Service, the nation’s highest honor for institutions that make significant and exceptional contributions to their communities. Read more

The Florida African American Museum Exchange (FAAME) is building a robust alliance of African American museums throughout the state of Florida to preserve and present historically significant documents, photos, artifacts, and buildings. Read more

Fifteen library and information science schools share high quality, cost-effective, and diverse online courses with each other’s students via the Web-based Information Science Education Consortium, or WISE. Read more

Seven Chattanooga museums, working closely with school principals, teachers, and parents, are using museum collections to enhance and energize the curricula of two museum magnet schools in Magnifying the Museums: Enhancing Chattanooga’s Museum Magnet School Partnership. Read more

Native American archivists, librarians, cultural directors, educators, museum staff members, and elders are creating communities to support tribal cultural preservation through a series of national conferences, institutes, and workshops.
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Students across the country are digging into the secrets of ancient Mesopotamia through a teaching Web site called Ancient Mesopotamia: This History, Our History, which allows students to direct virtual archeological expeditions and curate museum exhibits with the excavated artifacts. Read more

Plinkit, which stands for "Public Library Interface Kit," provides small libraries that have little to no web presence with a great Web site and the training necessary to update and maintain it. Read more

One of the winners of the 2007 National Medal for Museum Service, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry is part brain-powered playground for kids and adults, part cutting-edge classroom for communities across the state. Read more

In Illinois’ Lincoln Trail Libraries System and beyond, a pioneering new program that is putting patrons in touch with people who know their language best and can connect them to the information they need. Read more

To visit Amazement Square is to enter a world where art and adolescence colorfully collide. For the students of Laurel Regional School, who live with severe mental and physical disabilities, it is not your typical field trip. But an IMLS-funded program makes those trips as typical as possible. Read more

Garden State communities are quickly finding that history and high-tech intersect on the New Jersey Digital Highway, a newly developed web portal that is linking historical institutions around the state and helping to digitize their rich collections. Read more

Educators in five states are shedding new light on one of the nation’s darkest chapters – the internment of Japanese Americans. Enduring Communities is a three-year project that will incorporate this poignant perspective into public school history curricula. Read more

Ask a roomful of librarians to name the most tedious aspect of their work and writing and managing bibliographies will be at the top of the list. Researchers from the Center for History and New Media of George Mason University, funded in part by IMLS, have all but solved this problem with Zotero software. Read more

The Vermont Division for Historic Preservation is using a Partnership for a Nation of Learners grant to recruit pre-school through college teachers and others to help excavate a rare, mid-18th century French settlement in Addison, VT. Read more

By introducing young people to conservation, we help cultivate the next generation of adults who value our nation’s collections and their conservation. With this in mind, IMLS invited Girl Scout Troop 4563 in Arlington, VA, to participate in a conservation project. Read more

The Omaha Virtual Museum collects on its website widely dispersed artifacts, culturally important texts, and photographs of the Omaha tribe. Use of new media is helping the tribe maintain its culture now and for future generations. Read more

When disaster struck, the Children's Museum of Manhattan and the Louisiana Children's Museum offered each other much-needed assistance. An encouraging word, a timely donation, and a play-based program forged an enduring bond and created role models for the rest of us. Read more

For our March Project Profile, the Institute is taking a look back at three recipients of our Conservation Project Support grants. As the details of IMLS’ Connecting to Collections initiative unfold, we want to shine a spotlight on some of the important conservation work that the Institute has funded in the past. Read more

This month’s project profile highlights the winners of the 2006 National Awards for Museum and Library service, our nation’s highest honor for the exemplary public service offered by these institutions. Read more

A digital museum launched in 2001, the Maine Memory Network is a centralized online gateway to Maine history, provideing Maine’s cultural organizations with the resources they need to share images and items from their own collections. Read more

The National Constitution Center’s recent blockbuster exhibition was presented in celebration of the 300th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s birth in January 2006 and was made possible through an IMLS grant. Read more

Made possible through IMLS funding, a new field trip program of the Hall of Health educates 10- to 14-year-olds about body image, the consequences of being over- or under-weight, and making healthy food choices. Read more

Blessing Christ is one few examples of medieval Spanish sculpture represented in American museum collections. Having not been on view for over 30 years, its condition was extremely fragile, before an IMLS grant enabled the St. Louis Art Museum to stabilize the piece. Read more

To succeed in the 21st century the youth of today need skills in math, science, and technology. The Sky Camp project paired middle school teachers with the lifelong learning resources of public libraries to create a year-long educational series, enabling teens’ imaginations to take flight. Read more

The conservation message is challenging for zoos to present quickly and effectively. The Central Park Zoo, an innovator in interpretive concepts for zoos, has turned to poetry in its quest to portray the significance of the earth’s loss of biodiversity. Read more

The Pratt Museum's summer internship program is one way that the museum addresses the national need to provide students with national history and science education and provide job opportunities for local teens. Read more

The Washington State Library’s K–12 Library Initiative empowers school library staff with leadership skills, and has been the farthest reaching training program ever offered to the state’s school librarians. Read more

The Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust’s Architect Studio 3D is an interactive Web-based activity that enables users to become virtual architects, finding design solutions that meet the needs of virtual clients and virtual building sites. Read more

Knowing that art can be a powerful teaching tool in the K-12 classroom, the IUPUI University Library sought to provide a value-added resource for education.  
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The towering dinosaur fossil displays, the realistic cave exhibit, and the interactive simulated volcanoes at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science are catalysts for scientific exploration for adults and children alike.  
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The State Library and Archives of Florida received a rich collection from the Bureau of Florida Folklife Programs that was virtually unusable because there were no finding aids for it.  
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Homeless children are by most accounts among the fastest growing segments of the homeless population, accounting for 25 percent of the urban homeless population.  Read more