A cyber look at Albany Institute

An online archive provides a peek into the museum's collection

At 250 years old or so, the pointy red cap that makes its home in a third-floor storage room on Washington Avenue needs its rest. It's a colorful character, but its blush is fading.

W. Douglas McCombs handled it gently, pulling on light cotton gloves before bringing the old chapeau out for a quick visit with a small tour group at the Albany Institute of History & Art on Monday morning. The grenadier officer's mitre cap, worn by a British officer in the 1760s, features an elaborately embroidered coat of arms above the word "ALBANY" and, below it — representing one of the region's biggest trade items — a beaver.

The cap "is something that we exhibit rarely because of light conditions, because of preservation concerns," said McCombs, curator of history and material culture. Added the museum's interim director, Tammis K. Groft: "I don't think this has been on view for 20 years or more." After a few minutes' airing-out in the institute's storage rooms (which keep the temperature at 68 degrees and humidity at around 45 to 50 percent), back it went into hiding.

Curious visitors can see the cap online, right down to its needlepoint claws, in a recently launched database at http://www.albanyinstitute.org. Part of a revamped website, the database features 1,200 objects and library holdings, a number that will increase as the Institute photographs its collection. According to education director Erika Sanger, the new site was designed for teachers, researchers and the general public.

More Information

Explore the collection

The Albany Institute's growing online archive allows many ways to explore the collection:

To get there: Visit http://www.albanyinstitute.org and on tab above, click on "Collections"; at left, click on "Collections database"

Search: You can search by category, keyword, artist/maker, title, date range, medium/materials or accession/catalogue number

Save: Use "add to my collection" feature, at lower right of each image to create a collection of your favorites

Spend: Click on "request item in shop," also at lower right, to purchase a copy from the gift shop

McCombs said that items displayed on any given day represent "12 percent or less" of the institute's total stash — which, after more than 200 years of collecting, includes about 35,000 objects and around 1 million library holdings. The remaining 88 percent sits on three floors of storage: 17,000 square feet of climate-controlled space.

"Almost everything that you see here has some connection to Albany. It was either owned here, made here, imported and sold here — it has that link," he said. The collections "tell us a little bit more about Albany over the last four hundred or so years."

On Monday, McCombs led visitors into a third-floor vault holding silver, jewelry and miniatures. On the shelf: a 19th-century tea-and-coffee set. Below it: a collection of netsuke, ornately carved Japanese clothing fasteners brought to Albany in the 19th century by the Pruyn family. Leaving the vault, McCombs gently retrieved an 1870s print advertising the Albany Brewing Co. — smokestacks billowing, horses hauling carts loaded with beer. Like so much else in storage, the print only emerges for brief displays (three months tops) before being squirreled away into hibernation. The ideal rest is 12 years.

Onto the second floor, and furniture, sculptures, stoves.

"Most people have a very different idea when I say 'stove,'" McCombs said, pointing out a row of floridly designed cast-iron behemoths from the early- to mid-19th century. After a visit with an 18th-century double-leaved table, McCombs led the group to the first floor, home to model trains and steamboats ("people love the trains"), patent models (a paper boat?), textiles rolled on tubes (flags, quilts), plus an 1804 reduction of a 12-foot 1802 New York map — the first that displayed the state as a state.

After the tour, Groft was asked to name her favorite item. She couldn't. "We love them all," she said. "You can't imagine how much we adore these objects."

abiancolli@timesunion.com518-454-5439@AmyBiancolli
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