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Searchable Catalog
The Shaker Historical Society has many collections that it researches, documents, preserves, and shares with the public. Most objects relate to the Shakers of North Union—their clothing, inventions, and tools—but there is a growing collection related to Shaker Village and the development of Shaker Heights as a community.
For the past two years, SHS staff and volunteers have been adding our collections to CatalogIt, a cloud-based collections management database. With almost 700 items added and many more to go, this has been a time consuming but necessary move toward improved collections management and access. As of February 2024, over 200 items are available to the public through the museum's CatalogIt HUB.
These items have been catalogued using the More Product, Less Process (MPLP) approach, which focuses on minimal processing in order to reduce backlogs. This means that entries may have incomplete information and temporary photographs with a goal of further processing from volunteers and paid interns at a later time.
Do you have significants edits or information to add to these records? Please contact collections@shakerhistory.org
If you are looking for information or materials about a Shaker Heights person, place, or topic, please fill out our Research Request form.
If you would like a high-resolution image of an object in our collection for commercial, academic, or personal use, please fill out our Image Reproduction Request form.
Donate to the Collections
If you are interested in donating an object or archival material(s) to the collection, please contact collections@shakerhistory.org with description(s) and photograph(s) of the item(s) you wish to donate. Additional useful information to include:
How you acquired the item(s)
Where/from whom you acquired the item(s)
Time period of the item(s), if known
Average condition of the item(s)
How the item(s) relate(s) to the history of Shaker Heights, Warrensville Township, or the North Union Shakers
Please note: The Shaker Historical Society (SHS) is an Ohio History Connection (OHC) site. As such, OHC holds the right of first refusal for all donation offers to SHS. This means that any potential donation will first be offered to OHC for consideration. If OHC declines the donation, SHS may then choose to accept it.
Please see our Collection Donations Policy for more information on the subject areas and types of materials we collect.
We are actively seeking objects and archival materials that share underrepresented stories, including items related to:
Black residents, Black-owned businesses, and Black stories
Jewish residents, Jewish-owned businesses, and Jewish stories
Women residents, women-owned businesses, and women's stories
Integration in Shaker Heights
East View Village
Post-1950s history
Collections News
In spring 2024, we received an Ohio Historical Records Advisory Board (OHRAB) grant to inventory and rehouse photographic material in our Elizabeth Nord Library & Archives. The amount of paper-based photographs, glass plate negatives, tin types, film negatives, and slides greatly exceeded our estimates, but intern Makialani Kanewa-Mariano was able to complete an inventory of almost 2,000 materials and rehouse almost 400 photographs between May and November 2024.
Phase II will commence in summer 2025 and is made possible through an OHRAB grant and support from museum member John Barber. An intern will continue to rehouse photograph materials in our dedicated Photograph Archives and update the inventory with new information.
The initial 2024 inventory is now accessible to the public here. Please note that this is a preliminary finding aid that may contain typos, inaccuracies, or incomplete information. These issues will be addressed as the project progresses in the coming years. Photographs are digitized and added to CatalogIt on an ongoing basis.
Questions? Please contact collections@shakerhistory.org
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