The Smithsonian Institution has announced grants totaling $5.4 million from the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Walton Family Foundation in support of efforts to digitize the Archives of American Art's collections.

A $4.5 million grant from Terra includes a $4 million endowment challenge grant and $500,000 in operating support for the Smithsonian's current digitization program. The Archives of American Art comprises nearly six thousand collections related to the artists, collectors, dealers, and scholars who have shaped the history of art in America, while its oral history archive includes interviews with nearly twenty-three hundred art-world luminaries. To date, more than two million digital images of material from the archives have been created, providing online access to more than a hundred and sixty of its most important collections. The Terra Foundation helped launch the organization's digitization program in 2004 and has awarded nearly $15 million to the Smithsonian over the past dozen years.

In addition to the funding from Terra, a matching grant of up to $900,000 over three years from the Walton Family Foundation will enable the archives to double its current rate of digitization from fifty linear feet to a hundred linear feet of archival material a year.

"Terra's work with us in the realm of digitization at the archives goes far beyond a typical grantor–grantee relationship," said David Skorton, secretary of the Smithsonian. "Rather, the foundation's visionary approach has enabled us to build an exemplary public–private partnership that has resulted in universal access to the archives' collections through a program admired worldwide. With this new award and the incentive that the challenge grant creates, we will be working together to achieve the most important objective: sustaining the archives' digitization program in perpetuity and adding to our understanding of American art."