Collections

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

The Shaker Historical Society is guided by a Collections Management Policy (CMP) that defines the scope of our collection and how we care for and make collections available to the public. Our criteria for the collection includes:

If you are interested in donating an object or archival material(s) to the collection, please contact collections@shakerhistory.org with a description and photograph(s) of the item(s) you wish to donate. Please see the lists below for examples of what is currently held in our collection.

We cannot accept items that do not align with at least one of the above criteria and may decline your donation if the item does not fit the scope of collections, if the item cannot be properly stored or cared for due to limited storage space and resources, or if the item is a duplicate of a current collections item.

Objects are generally three-dimensional items that require more storage space.

Examples in our collection include:

Archival materials are generally two-dimensional items that require less storage space.

Examples in our collection include:

We are actively seeking objects and archival materials that share underrepresented stories, including items related to: