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The Louis Shotridge Digital Archive makes available, for the first time, 4,000 high resolution digital images of Louis Shotridge’s objects, papers, photographs, and sound recordings. The Penn Museum initiated this project in 2006, in response to the interest expressed by members of the Tlingit community who were striving to regain knowledge of their Tlingit history and heritage and to engage in conversations with the Penn Museum around the Shotridge collections.

 

We are pleased to make this collection available online in 2011. In so doing, we honor Louis's legacy and his expressed intention to preserve and promote Tlingit culture on a world stage where it can be studied and appreciated by all people in the years to come. Through this project, Louis Shotridge’s collections, located in disparate archives, come together in one searchable database. It is now possible to read Louis's letters to Museum Director George Byron Gordon, to hear his sound recordings, to look at the photographs he took while in the field, and to see each of the objects he purchased from different Tlingit communities.

 

We hope this digital archive will inspire you to learn more about Tlingit and Native Alaskan history and that you will share your comments, suggestions and questions with us as you explore these remarkable records. We also hope that it will assist Tlingit people in their efforts of cultural revitalization.