Local history is important to our community, and having resources available online, has opened access to documents that are fragile, and in need of preservation.  Having a digitized archive has made finding relevant material much more efficient, and enabled us to integrate multiple resources within one search.  Our community history archive has allowed us to serve a global audience, rather than just those individuals who walk through our doors.  Digitized resources are invaluable, and we plan to continue to add resources to our Community History Archive each year.

You can go online and search for anything in those papers, and you can even crop sections, add notations, and save it as a digital image instead of taking out a newspaper from 1926. Archivists know it’s not the newspaper that’s valuable, but the content in that paper. We have a number of publications we can’t even bring out of the box because they’re just falling apart.