Digitization - Help us Preserve Nevada County's History
We’d like to ask for your help. The Nevada County Historical Society, and particularly Searls Library, has extensive collections of unique historical documents, photos and maps of our county.
These are amazing resources to explore local family histories, research local properties and so much more.
But what if a local disaster was to strike, like Altadena or Paradise, California, and everything was lost?
In August 2024, we embarked on an ambitious project to digitize everything at the Searls Historical Library. We have now expanded our efforts to help all our local museums and libraries to scan and digitize our precious history. While we have scanned an amazing 120,000+ pages of materials, we need to purchase equipment to tackle over 8,000 photo negatives. Most of these are large format and don't fit a regular 35mm negative scanner. And we want to start digitizing over 10,000 maps, but need an expensive large format scanner for that.
You can see what we have been able to do with very little budget and an all-volunteer team.
Would you be able to help to fund our next steps?
Digitization is not just in case of disaster, but also to preserve at-risk items, like aging film and magnetic tape. It can also provide access to fragile original materials, without fear of damaging them. Not to mention helping us to showcase our history to local schools, visitors and further afield. A key benefit though is to make our records searchable and accessible, both online and to library visitors.
We take advantage of the latest OCR technology (optical character recognition) to turn typed or printed materials into fully searchable online documents. We use the latest AI to transcribe old videos and to match similar images you are looking for, and one day transcribe all our handwritten materials. Other exciting ideas include an online map of local photographs to see Grass Valley or Nevada City locations through the ages or to see modern roads and buildings overlaid on old maps.
In August 2024, we embarked on an ambitious project to digitize everything at the Searls Historical Library. We have now expanded our efforts to help all our local museums and libraries to scan and digitize our precious history. While we have scanned an amazing 120,000+ pages of materials, we need to purchase equipment to tackle over 8,000 photo negatives. Most of these are large format and don't fit a regular 35mm negative scanner. And we want to start digitizing over 10,000 maps, but need an expensive large format scanner for that.
You can see what we have been able to do with very little budget and an all-volunteer team.
Would you be able to help to fund our next steps?
Digitization is not just in case of disaster, but also to preserve at-risk items, like aging film and magnetic tape. It can also provide access to fragile original materials, without fear of damaging them. Not to mention helping us to showcase our history to local schools, visitors and further afield. A key benefit though is to make our records searchable and accessible, both online and to library visitors.
We take advantage of the latest OCR technology (optical character recognition) to turn typed or printed materials into fully searchable online documents. We use the latest AI to transcribe old videos and to match similar images you are looking for, and one day transcribe all our handwritten materials. Other exciting ideas include an online map of local photographs to see Grass Valley or Nevada City locations through the ages or to see modern roads and buildings overlaid on old maps.
Over 5,500 Nevada County district courtcases dating from 1856.
Hundreds of drawers and shelves filled with documents, maps and other records.
We need your help to fund these projects. But more importantly, we need volunteers to help scan the materials. We are ready to get folk trained and how to digitize our history like a pro. It’s kinda fun!
To give you a sense for what lies ahead, the Searls Library collections alone includes:
Over 30,000 local photographs, which you can already search online.
Over 900 volumes of property tax assessment books.
About 10,000 maps in 90+ drawers, plus 10,000 digitized county maps.
About 750 assorted volumes of registers and other old records.
Over 5,500 original court case transcripts of testimony and depositions.
About 3,000 books, folders, binders, old and contemporary.
About 50 file drawers of carefully filed company, mine and family archives.
Plus more than 200 drawers and shelves with old newspapers, mine records and much more.
All these are original documents dating back as far as the 1850s. As a rough estimate we have about a million pages to scan.
You likely know that the Nevada County Historical Society is 100% volunteer-based with no paid employee or outside funding, except for your generous donations.
So would you be able to help us out?
To give you a sense for what lies ahead, the Searls Library collections alone includes:
All these are original documents dating back as far as the 1850s. As a rough estimate we have about a million pages to scan.
You likely know that the Nevada County Historical Society is 100% volunteer-based with no paid employee or outside funding, except for your generous donations.
So would you be able to help us out?