The Randolph Historical Society won an award from the Vermont Historical Society for their digitization project which put over six hundred photos by Randolph photographers or about Randolph topics. The Award of Merit is from the VHS's League of Local Historical Societies & Museums Achievement Awards in their Access/Digitzation category.
See all of their images on the Randolph Historical Society's Flickr account.
As RHS explains in their application, "This project is a digitization and online access project for historical photos of Randolph and by Randolph photographers. It provides extra points of access to a set of newly-created digital archives. It is also a model for shoestring digitization projects for other tiny historical societies."
This project involved the work of
- Forrest Macgregor - project manager, image selection, image correction
- Devon Blomquist - handwriting deciphering, name identification
- Sophie Miller - digitization
- Jessamyn West - uploading, transcribing, metadata
Items scanned included sets of images such as
- Family albums of local families both well-known and less well-known (Joan Raymond an early female business owner of Randolph, Nutting family photographs including images from the 1850s)
- Glass negatives of images from the 1800s from local photographers such as Guy Lamson and Luther Sparhawk
- Collections of postcards with images of Randolph collected by Ted Peck which span Randolph's history
The project has uploaded 677 photos since May 2024. They are grouped into sixteen different albums, four of which we've embedded on the Randolph Historical Society's website and been able to share on Facebook which has allowed us to get feedback on some unknown buildings and people, though some of them remain unknown.
The Randolph Historical Society has other exciting projects in the works, helping bring more of their archives out into the open. Stay tuned!
Making Randolph a better place to live, work, and play.