Museum of Houston

The Museum of Houston is a Preservation Houston project offering access to Houston's rich history using digitized materials from the archives of the city's leading educational and cultural institutions. The project aims to work with the Houston community to bring the city's hidden history to light.

About the museum
In 2005, Houston's leading institutions attended a meeting called by Preservation Houston (then Greater Houston Preservation Alliance) to discuss the possibility of building an online Houston history museum and repository of archival materials related to the city's history. The following year, GHPA received a two-year grant from Houston Endowment Inc. to hire staff and undertake project planning. The project was introduced by then-Houston Mayor Bill White, Rice University President David Leebron and JP Morgan Chase Regional Vice President Will Williams.

During the initial phase of the project, more than 500 historic photos and documents from institutions including the Woodson Research Center at Rice University, the Houston Public Library, the Robert J. Terry Library at Texas Southern University and the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library were added to the Museum of Houston repository. Digitization at local archives has come a long way since that time. Today, many of Houston's libraries and institutional archives have begun their own digitization initiatives, making a central digital repository unnecessary. The Museum of Houston is adapting to this changing landscape with a new plan: Rather than scanning archival items into its own repository, the museum will incorporate already-digitized materials into rich online exhibits focused on different aspects of Houston's history. A prototype exhibit, Tall, Taller, Tallest, looks at the rise of the Houston skyline in the 20th century. Other exhibits in the planning and design stages include:

• For the Record, which will tell the stories of the careers of prominent Houston attorneys in their own words. The exhibit is built around a series of videotaped interviews; originally the attorneys profiled are Rusty Hardin, Craig Washington, Diana Marshall, Richard "Racehorse" Haynes and Percy Foreman.

• A digitization of the six-volume Houston Architectural Survey of 300 historically and architecturally significant structures originally completed in 1980. The 1,500-page survey includes information on many of Houston's most important historic structures as well as many lesser-known buildings, several of which have been altered or demolished in the three decades since the initial survey work was done. The first phase of the exhibit will involve making a searchable version of the survey available online, with later phases targeted at updating and expanding the work.

• An exhibit tracing the history of the Port of Houston, one of the city's vital institutions, from its origins in the 1840s to today. This exhibit will be designed as the backbone for a broader look at Buffalo Bayou, Houston's historic lifeline.

On completion, the redesigned Museum of Houston website will feature more functionality, expanded exhibits and improved interaction with other online sources for Houston and Texas history.

If you'd like to browse the original Museum of Houston website, please click here.

For more information, e-mail Jim Parsons.