worthwhile by public contributors when their input is tangibly applied to an exhibition,

program, or online database. Museums gain user-content and the users experience a

sense of accomplishment and contribution to the larger community. Community co-

design is a symbiotic relationship between museums and the communities they serve. I

apply the notion of community co-design in my project goals and methods, because I

agree with Simon's belief that museums can better serve the communities they

represent by providing new platforms, digital or otherwise, for information sharing and

community contribution (Simon 2009).1

                                   Project Methods

       The Florida Museum Project wiki initially grew out of a budding partnership with a

larger collection database initiative titled The Southeastern Native American Collections

Project (SNACP), overseen by Dr. Jason Baird Jackson at Indiana University. Through

his research as a Folklorist and Material Cultural specialist, Jackson has identified an

absence of online representation of cultural materials from Southeastern Native

American groups, including the Florida Seminole and Miccosukee Tribes (Personal

Correspondence August 13, 2009). Simultaneous to Dr. Jackson's SNACP project, I

was working on several projects at the Florida Museum of Natural History, and I wanted

to create a thesis project that would increase access to the Florida Ethnographic

Collection (FEC) for Native and non-Native researchers alike. At the outset, I planned

to expand access to Florida Ethnographic Collection information by organizing

collections information that exists in the form of catalog cards, accession files, loan files,


1 This notion of engaging communities as museum partners was originally articulated in Mastering Civic
Engagement (1992); however community co-design fleshes out the general proposals set forth by the AAM
Museums and Community Initiative and discusses hands-on approaches to realizing successful community
partnerships.