First in a series…
Plant fossil imprints thousands of years old. A collection of photographs of the construction of Green Peter Dam from the 1950’s. Photos of the founding families of Sweet Home. How does a museum face the challenge of inventorying, cataloging and preserving their inventory, yet make is accessible to anyone that walks through the front door?
Thanks to a Sweet Home Community Foundation grant, the staff and volunteers at the East Linn Museum have taken a giant step toward the goal of making their inventory easily available to Sweet Home citizens. East Linn Museum successfully competed for a $2,000 Community Foundation grant to buy a computer, scanner and digital camera needed to bring the museum into the age of technology.
There are about 5,000 artifacts in the East Linn Museum. Director Gail Gregory and her staff and volunteers are busy scanning and digitally storing information from the entire East Linn Museum collection.
“The Sweet Home Community Foundation grant helped us achieve one of our major goals, which is to modernize the museum and make our information available to all. It means a lot to us because itís from local people. This grant is making our collection more accessible to everyone in Sweet Home, from students to historical researchers. We are also able to respond quickly now when people want to give us a copy of an important photo. We can scan it almost instantly, instead of having to send it away, which took several weeks and was expensive.
“We are in the process of cross-referencing everything we have,” continued Gregory. “When people come in looking for information on their family or an event they can search and find anything related to that particular topic. The grant was a real boost to our volunteers to help make the museum more user friendly.”
This is one of a series of article highlighting 2003 Sweet Home Community Foundation grant recipients. 2004 Community Foundation grant applications will be available December 1, 2003 through January 16, 2004 at the Chamber of Commerce.
For more information on the Sweet Home Community Foundation, or if you’d like to donate to the current campaign “Give Where You Live” call 367-9206.