The Quilt Index is used by a wide range of humanities scholars and teachers, from analyses of material culture in literature, to studies by art historians of the development and dissemination of particular patterns or techniques, to explorations by women's, ethnic, labor, and social historians.

Thanks to funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the site now features over 47,000 quilts from public and private collections. New collection contributors funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Expansion grant and/or by the contributors themselves are:
• Hawaiian Quilt Research Project,
• Louisiana Regional Folklife Program,
• Minnesota Quilt Project,
• New England Quilt Museum/MassQuilts,
• The Heritage Quilt Project of New Jersey at Rutgers University Libraries/ Special Collections and University Archives,
• North Carolina Museum of History,
• Rhode Island Quilt Documentation Project at University of Rhode Island,
• West Virginia Heritage Quilt Search, Inc., and
• Wyoming Quilt Project, Inc.

The expanded site also features a new graphic design and navigation features, as well as zoom and comparison tools developed with an Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant.

The Quilt Index has also developed an H-Net Member Portal page on the Quilt Index Wiki, http://www2.matrix.msu.edu/~quilti/wiki/index.php/H-Net_Member_Portal.
Here you can find relevant quilts in the Quilt Index database for just about every H-Net list, learn how to search the Quilt Index effectively, and get ideas for using quilts in your teaching and research activities.

IMLS funding along with a generous grant from the Salser Family Foundation made possible another compelling component of the expansion: the Signature Quilt Project (SQP). The SQP provided an opportunity to pilot the public submission of privately owned quilts that carry inscribed names and thus opens up new opportunities for using quilts as primary records in research.

Visit the new and improved Quilt Index today at www.quiltindex.org!

The Quilt Index is a joint project of The Alliance for American Quilts, Michigan State University's MATRIX: Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online, and the Michigan State University Museum.