News
Juilee Decker

The goal of libraries, museums, and archives around the world is to safeguard historical documents, but some objects can deteriorate with time. RIT’s Cultural Heritage Imaging (CHI) lab is using funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a relatively low-cost system that makes cultural heritage imaging methods more accessible.

The Secret Lives of Books, a special topics elective offered by the museum studies program in the College of Liberal Arts, gives hands-on experience with paper, ink, pigments, and all the material components of a book.

Juilee Decker, professor in the Department of History, spoke on WXXI's Connections with Evan Dawson about the art of cultural preservation.

RIT’s interdisciplinary collaborations enrich research across the university and beyond. Two of these collaborative projects recently received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of a total $22.6 million in grants given to support humanities projects across the nation.

Led by Professor Juilee Decker, Professor David Messinger, and Professor Roger Easton Jr., the development of the MISHA system was originally planned to help small- to medium-sized cultural institutions in the United States.

Photos from past internships, events, and research projects at Genesee Country Village & Museum stretch from floor to ceiling in the new Wehrheim Gallery on campus. Located on the first-floor of the new Student Hall for Exploration and Development (SHED), the Wehrheim Gallery will be used to highlight work done as part of RIT’s partnership with GCV&M.

The low-cost multispectral imaging system MISHA, or the Multispectral Imaging System for Historical Artifacts, was developed by RIT experts to uncover object details that aren’t visible to the naked eye.

An interdisciplinary pair of RIT students is headed to Bethesda, Md., to participate in the 2023 Lockheed Martin Ethics in Engineering Case Competition. Emma Nastro, a third-year museum studies student, and Lee Sortore, a fifth-year mechanical engineering student, will represent RIT at the competition, which is held Feb. 27 through March 1 at the Lockheed Martin Center for Leadership Excellence. This is the first time an RIT team has competed in this competition.

Scientists from RIT are turning studio photography technology on its head to help museums and other cultural heritage institutions preserve historically significant artifacts.

Libraries and museums across the country have begun recapturing lost and obscured text on historically significant documents thanks to low-cost spectral imaging systems developed by faculty and students at RIT.

The Democrat and Chronicle talks to John Aasp, gallery director, and Juilee Decker, professor in the Department of History, about the “Clarissa Uprooted: Unearthing Stories of Our Village (1940s-early 1970s),” exhibit at City Art Space.

The field of museum studies is changing. Not only are the people working in nationwide cultural institutions becoming more diverse, but the narratives told within those institutions are more inclusive and equity-focused. RIT’s museum studies program, led by Program Director Juilee Decker, aims to accelerate this momentum.