Since 1992
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AUGUSTA — The Kennebec Historical Society, 107 Winthrop St., emphasizes the collection of Kennebec County family and organizational documents and photographs. Twenty years ago, the society’s catalog was entirely on paper; it has now been moved to a computer database available for interested researchers.
To stay current and useful to its clients, the society believes the next step is to move its database to the internet and offer not only indexes but also scanned images of complete documents, transcriptions of handwritten and printed documents, and images of photographs and other objects.
To that end, the society earlier this year applied through the Maine State Archives for a grant from the Historical Collections Grant Program, funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, to hire interns to help catalog the internet effort and, therefore, reduce or eliminate the backlog.
In March, KHS received notification the request for $3,628.26 had been approved, in full. The grant will cover hiring interns for the spring and fall as well as purchasing supplies and computer hardware to support the “digitization” effort. Combining this with donations received to support summer interns, the society should be well on its way to eliminating the immediate backlog.
Although it will take some time and financial resources to get to that point, the society’s collections committee believes now is the time to take steps in preparation. This means as well as indexing documents using key words denoting subjects, locations, organizations, events, type of items and names, the society need to start “digitizing” its items; that is, scanning photographs, using optical character recognition to convert printed items to text documents, and transcribing hand written documents.
If the society starts now, it won’t have to go back and do it later when documents and other historical images are ready to move to the internet. However, this adds considerable time to the act of cataloging items. Essentially, the society is building up a backlog of uncatalogued materials as it purchases items and receives them as donations.
Current researchers at the society will immediately see the results of this effort as records of newly-cataloged items will contain full text transcriptions that can be read and/or printed at the society. Photographs also will be available for printing, as will scans of documents.
For more information about the Kennebec Historical Society, one may call 207-622-7718. 
