On July 7, 2016 NCCHP was pleased to welcome Rachel Onuf, the Massachusetts State Historical Records Advisory Board (SHRAB) Roving Archivist, back to NCCHP to review the Research Library's progress and provide expert counsel on how best to continue cleaning, organizing and presenting Noble & Cooley's extensive manufacturing history archives and artifact inventory. Rachel has provided many crucial insights into archiving techniques and resources and this visit was no exception. Her expertise in this area has been extremely valuable and we thank Rachel once again for her very able assistance.
After a thorough discussion of the physical archives the discussion branched into digitization opportunities. It has been our strong belief that the NCCHP mission to "keep the drumbeat of history" alive is best served by making our amazing treasure trove of historical documents available to the greatest possible audience. With the vast majority of the audience outside convenient driving range of Granville that means bringing the collection to the audience via some sort of internet platform.
Rachel suggested we look into the Digital Commonwealth as a potential means of digitizing a meaningful proportion of the archives and as a way to deliver the content via Digital Commonwealth's web resources.
An initial review of Digital Commonwealth has been very favorable and if all goes well we hope to have some content available by the end of 2016.
Here's some additional information about Digital Commonwealth but first a word of caution. If you have any interest in history and go exploring the web site, you will easily lose track of a few hours if you're not careful. It's that fascinating. So here it is: Digital Commonwealth web site; example of how a library uses Digital Commonwealth
Stay tuned for progress reports on the NCCHP Digital Commonwealth digitization project!
