Flickr Commons

If you are not aware of Flickr Commons, you may went to check their web site. It is a way for organizations like ours to make our historical photographs available on the web. I have sent them an inquiry. Apparently, not just anyone can sign up so I am trying to determine the criteria. I was looking through the collection of photos here at the library. I am going to scan some of them into TIFF. If nothing else, it, it will get us thinking about standards, procedures, and metadata.

Grant Information

I have been talking about "the grant" for several months so, for those of you who not have been here from the beginning, let me back up and tell you what it is all about. We are requesting $35,000 through a Library Services and Technology Act grant. This is federal money intended to improve local library services. The competitive grant program is administered by the State; specifically, the Bureau of Commonwealth Libraries. The grant we applied for will allow us to digitize 67 items from the collections of the Scranton Public Library, Lackawanna Historical Society, Steamtown National Historic Site, Anthracite Heritage Museum, and Times-Tribune newspaper library. The name of the proposed project is "Out of the Wilderness: The Development and Industrialization of the Scranton Area 1850-1865." We plan to digitize entire books published during or pertaining to that era, photographs, maps, letters, business documents, and even a cane inscribed with the names of Civil War veterans. The grant will pay for the digitization of these items, a digital archiving management system, attendant hardware to be installed here at the library (and designed to accommodate this and future projects). metadata entry, and publicity. We should find out about the grant in the spring of 2010. The project would commence in June of 2010 and we would be completed by May 31 2011. By then all 67 items would be accessible via the Internet. Between now and the spring, there are some other things we can do. Stay tuned...