Summer Projects at The History Center...

As engagement with local history on digital platforms has grown, we - along with others across the museum and arts field - have struggled with the long hours and high technical costs that go into digitizing our physical archives. 

This summer thanks to the work of multiple high-school interns, student workers, and docents, community volunteers, and local historians we've continued on the long process of digitizing and improving accessibility to our local history collections as well as national archives on digital platforms. 

This summer six Exhibit Hall workers transcribed over 380 pages through the Smithsonian Transcription Center; mostly contributing to digitization of the Freedmen's Bureau Papers, and 'Celebrating 175' collections. Our YES (Youth Employment Services) Teen Worker added five of our photograph collections to the platform HistoryPin. These collections have already been viewed by hundreds of people around the world! Our HistoryForge volunteers have made significant progress adding records to the HistoryForge Ithaca project and thanks to some very exciting grant news (read below!) are moving forward full steam ahead with the recently released 1950 census for the City of Ithaca. HistoryForge also recently completed the digitization of our Tompkins County Clock Maps to New York Heritage Digital Collections!

One of our undergraduate summer interns transcribed a series of 20-50 year old pamphlets about historic buildings and businesses in Tompkins County. Our high school interns also continued the year-long process of adding verified subtitles to all videos and programs on our YouTube channel. Adding captions to our videos ensures that they are accessible and easier to engage with for more audiences. It's a slow process, but we've now transcribed over 90% of our videos! Our volunteers in the archives in collaboration with THC staff, completed over a dozen additional Archival Finding Aids for our boxed collections, continuing the project funded by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation last year.

In addition the two part-time transcribers hired through our 'Preserving Community Oral Histories' grant from the American Historical Association in July have already made progress on dozens of interview transcripts from our Oral Histories of Tompkins County Collection in their first 8 weeks.

THANK YOU TO ALL OF OUR SUMMER WORKERS! We still have volunteer, docent, and internship positions available for the fall term for all ages. 

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This article is from the September 2022 History Happenings newsletter.