Month: March 2019

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Masonic Museum Collection Now Online

We are excited to announce a new online feature that will make the Museum more useful and accessible than ever!

While we regularly change our exhibits at the Masonic Library & Museum of Indiana, it reflects only a tiny portion of our vast collection. In the years that we have been located in our present home in Indiana Freemasons Hall (and with the dedicated assistance of our IUPUI Museum Studies interns), we have been carefully cataloguing all of our various artifacts. We use a specialized program, PastPerfect Museum Software, to document and track all of our objects, whether you actually see them on display or not.

Now, through our association with Past Perfect Software, we are making it possible to view the collection online. Clicking on our ONLINE COLLECTION link will open a separate PastPerfectOnline portal that will let you access and search the photographic and written records.

Take the opportunity to browse our collection and see what surprises we have in our vaults!

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New in the Library – MSA Short Talk Bulletin Collection

The Masonic library and Museum of Indiana has just acquired a new six-volume collection of the Masonic Service Association’s Short Talk Bulletins.

The MSA has published a Short Talk Bulletin virtually every month since 1923. They were conceived in pre-internet days as a partial answer to the howls from Masons back in the 1920s and before—right up to today—who begged for Masonic education at their lodge meetings. If Masons wouldn’t do research themselves, and grand lodges published lousy newsletters and magazines, so the thinking went, at the very least the little STB always offered a monthly dose of ready made, discussion-provoking material. Today, the entire set is a treasure trove of knowledge on hundreds of topics, presented in more than 1,000 concise articles.

Our old collection of the original STBs was incomplete and hadn’t been updated in over a decade. Additionally, they took up three sets of shelves and were not indexed. The entire collection through 2016 has been freshly edited, typeset, and indexed by S. Brent Morris, editor of the Scottish Rite Journal. This makes them far more useful and accessible than ever before.