Cooperstown, New York – South Central Regional Library Council (SCRLC) has awarded a $5,557.50 Technology and Digitization Grant to Fenimore Art Museum to digitize a collection of microfilmed newspapers from Chenango County and Delaware County. The project was directed by Megan Culbert.
The newspaper titles include the New Berlin Gazette and the Delhi Delaware Express. The newly digitized newspapers will be added to NYS Historic Newspapers, nyshistoricnewspapers.org, where Fenimore Art Museum has uploaded scores of other regional newspaper titles.
Newspapers serve as an incredibly important and sometimes rare resource for 20th-century social history. As a result, genealogists, local historians, and students studying the early culture and contemporary history of towns within Delaware and Chenango County will greatly benefit from free, publicly available online access to these resources.
Microfilm is a format of film, usually stored on a reel, that contains microphotographs. Microfilm was a popular way of reformatting and storing newspapers because it is a stable format, slow to deteriorate, and requires significantly less storage space. The reels are easier to digitize than physical newspapers, especially for old newspapers that are fragile and difficult to handle.
About The South Central Regional Library Council
The South Central Regional Library Council is one of nine Library Councils comprising the Empire State Library Network (ESLN). As a multi-type library consortium, SCRLC serves 69 members across 10,000 square miles in the counties of Allegany, Broome, Cayuga, Chemung, Chenango, Cortland, Delaware, Otsego, Schuyler, Seneca, Steuben, Tioga, Tompkins, and Yates. SCRLC provides services to 18 academic libraries, 13 hospitals, 12 public libraries, library systems and their members, 6 school library systems and their members, 6 special libraries and 14 affiliate members. SCRLC reaches over 500 libraries in its service area. For more information about SCRLC, visit www.scrlc.org.
About Fenimore Art Museum
Fenimore Art Museum, located on the shores of Otsego Lake—James Fenimore Cooper’s “Glimmerglass”—in historic Cooperstown, New York, features a wide-ranging collection of American art including folk art; important American 18th- and 19th-century landscape, genre, and portrait paintings; more than 125,000 historic photographs representing the technical developments made in photography and providing extensive visual documentation of the region’s unique history; and the renowned Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art comprised of nearly 900 art objects representative of a broad geographic range of North American Indian cultures, from the Northwest Coast, Eastern Woodlands, Plains, Southwest, Great Lakes, and Prairie regions. Visit FenimoreArt.org.
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