HomeAbout MOHAIThe MOHAI BlogWashington Digital Heritage Grant Project: Supporting Our Online Collection

Washington Digital Heritage Grant Project: Supporting Our Online Collection

By MOHAI / August 19, 2025

The MOHAI Library team has been busy improving our online collection, which launched last November.

Our Temporary Metadata Archivist, Kerri Keil, has been updating information in our records to make things easier to find in some of our older records, previously only shared through our partnership with the University of Washington’s Digital Collections, as well as adding newly transferred digital images into the new online collection.

About the Grant

Logos of the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Washington State Library.

In the fall of 2024, MOHAI received a Washington Digital Heritage grant to add materials to MOHAI’s online collection. Washington Digital Heritage grants are administered by the Library Services and Technology Act, through the Washington State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State. Supported with funding provided by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), this project has funded Kerri’s work.

About the Project

When updating records, Kerri standardizes date and creator fields, attaches new subject headings, and adds credit and copyright information. She updates terms as part of our reparative description work, improving captions to reflect how we describe things today.

Photograph of archivist Kerri Keil working on the MOHAI Collection database.

Temporary Metadata Archivist Kerri Keil works on updating records for the online collection.

Kerri has also added new digital photographs taken in 2002 and 2003, previously stored on CDs in our Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection. These important images have been transferred from the failing CDs as part of MOHAI’s digital preservation efforts and are shared with the public for the first time at MOHAI through Kerri’s work.

While this project was put on hold for six weeks this spring when IMLS funding was abruptly cancelled and later reinstated, the team has been able to complete a significant portion of the intended project. Explore all of the items updated and newly added to the online collection through the grant.

Other staff in MOHAI’s Library have also been helping the project by attaching images and preparing new records, editing and approving items to launch in the online collection, and updating our finding aids. The team has been sharing materials added through posts on the MOHAI Blog (like this one!) and adding new Themed Collections, populated in part through Kerri’s work. While our Washington Digital Heritage project ends at the end of August, we plan to keep moving items into our new online collection each month.

Scroll through carousel below to see some of the items added during the project.

Sepia-toned portrait of Henry Yesler and Chief Ouray.

Color photograph of Jeanne Wharnsby swimming laps at the downtown Seattle YWCA pool.

White bumper sticker with black text that reads

Muckleshoot fishery in lower Duwamish River, 2002 MOHAI, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection, 2000.107.20021101.CD01.005, photo by Paul Joseph Brown.

Orange poster with black text advertising the concert of Napalm Beach and Baba Yaga on July 26.

Jae Oh speaking to customers in line at Magic Garden Chinese Eatery, with beverages and condiments visible in the background.

Henry Yesler and Chief Ouray

This photographic print shows Ouray (circa 1833–1880), chief of the Uncompahgre band of the Ute tribe, with Seattle entrepreneur Henry L. Yesler (1810-1892), possibly during Yesler's tenure as acting Indian Agent.

Seattle YWCA Pool

Here, Jeanne Wharnsby was photographed for a story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer story about the YWCA closing its downtown Seattle warm-water swimming pool and fitness center.

Taxi Company Boycott

This bumper sticker, created by the Congress of Racial Equity's Seattle chapter, advocated for the boycott of taxi companies Farwest and Graytop, after a Washing State Board of Discrimination investigation found that neither company employed African American drivers.

Muckleshoot Fishing

In November of 2002, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer completed a six-month investigation into the ecological health of the Puget Sound. This photo illustrates a Muckleshoot Tribal salmon fishery on the lower Duwamish River before a planned river clean up in the fall of 2003.

Napalm Beach and Baba Yaga

Le Club Hit, open only from 1983 to 1985, functioned as a batting cage by day and a club by night, often catering to an under-age crowd. This poster featured the band Napalm Beach, credited as an early innovator of grunge, with an unknown Baba Yaga band (a female band with the same name formed in Seattle the 1990s, but that post-dates this poster).

Jae Oh Speaking at Magic Garden Chinese Eatery

Jae Oh arrived in Seattle in 1993 and opened the Chinese fast-food restaurant Magic Garden Chinese Eatery in 1999. Here, Oh, center, waits on customers, mostly Garfield High School students, during a weekday lunch hour at his store near the intersection of 23rd Avenue South and South Jackson Street.