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2008–2009
The gift: The museum's closure was announced in March 2008, and it closed to the public on 30 June 2008. In December 2008 the Lincoln Financial Foundation donated the collection to the people of Indiana — Governor Mitch Daniels made the announcement — and ownership of the collection rests with the State of Indiana. The state split it between two homes: the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis holds the fine art, sculpture, prints and engravings, sheet music and three-dimensional artifacts, while the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne holds the books, newspapers, documents and photographs.
Fort Wayne's share: The library's portion includes 126 items written or signed by Lincoln, 246 letters written to Lincoln, signed items from every president from Washington to Clinton, and the Lincoln Family Album, photographs of four generations of the Lincoln family, acquired in 1990. The papers moved to the library in late May 2009, into a climate-controlled vault, to be read in the Fine Book Room. Jane Gastineau, the Lincoln Museum's curator, moved with the collection on 1 July 2009 as its librarian; she retired on 31 July 2019.
Digitization: Working through the Internet Archive, the library had put 15,219 items online in full text by 2019, viewed 5.37 million times; the LincolnCollection.org website was built in 2011–12. The collection is supported by an endowment under the Friends of the Lincoln Collection of Indiana.
Sources:
- Journal Gazette, March 2008, and the December 2008 gift announcements — the closure, the donation and the state arrangement.
- The Lincoln Collection (lincolncollection.org) and the Allen County Public Library's Lincoln Collection pages — the Fort Wayne holdings and the vault.
- Weekly View — Jane Gastineau's move with the collection in 2009 and her 2019 retirement.