This sounds impressive. From the Smoky Mountain News:
On Friday, June 11, the Museum of the Cherokee Indian will celebrate the grand opening of its new Resource and Education Building. The centerpiece of the $2 million project is a new archives facility and digital reading room that will open up the tribe’s historic documents to its membership.
The new building also has a multimedia classroom and a community arts center, two spaces that will integrate the knowledge of Cherokee history with the practice of Cherokee culture in a way that brings the museum to life. The project was funded with help of grants from the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, the N.C. Arts Council, the EBCI, and individual donors.
For Blankenship, who has grown the museum through years of hard work, planning, and community building, the new wing is a bridge to the tribe’s vast cache of documents and artifacts.
“For the first time we now know where everything is, and we can find it with a computer,” Blankenship said.
The reading room in the new wing has eight computers that provide access to 25,000 image files, 12,000 pages of material from the 1830s and the Trail of Tears, 2,000 pages of Cherokee language material from the 1880s and much, much more.
For instance, with cooperation from the family of Will Thomas –– the white trader adopted by Yonaguska who was instrumental in preserving the Cherokee’s ancestral homeland –– the archives have landed 20 years of his diaries and papers, his writing desk and a valuable portrait of Thomas that dates to 1846.
Talk about bringing history to life, Thomas’s first trading post was located on a site where a Huddle House now sits near Soco Creek in downtown Cherokee.
Archivist Bo Taylor said the new facility makes the museum a national center for research on the Cherokee people.
“If you want to come do Cherokee research, you want to come here,” Taylor said.