Martha’s Vineyard Museum has received a $293,900 grant to make detailed descriptions of its collections searchable online, museum officials announced this week.

The grant is the largest in the museum’s 90 year history, said museum executive director David Nathan, and builds on preservation work that has been supported by Community Preservation grants from five Island towns.

The museum will use the funds to make it easy for scholars and the public to search the web to discover what is in the museum’s archival collections. While the museum’s archives relate directly to the Vineyard, they have broader interest in the that they document connections between the Island and the rest of the world, particularly in areas of trade and maritime industries, the museum said in a statement.

The grant comes from the Council on Library and Information Resources, which is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Since 2008, the council has awarded Cataloguing Hidden Collections and Archives grants to support the identification and cataloging of special collections and archives that are difficult or impossible to locate.

Grant recipients must follow certain standards to create Web-accessible records so that scholars can search across many different collections at the same time.