Litchfield Historical Society Receives Common Heritage Grant

From Litchfield Historical Society: The Litchfield Historical Society is pleased to announce it is the recipient of a Common Heritage grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant will be used for a Community Digitization Project to help prepare for the 300th Anniversary of the town of Litchfield.

The Common Heritage Grant Program aims to capture America’s cultural heritage through preservation projects with libraries, museums, archives, other community organizations, as well as through the sharing of family histories and life stories. The program supports both the digitization of cultural heritage materials and the organization of public programming at community events that explore these materials as a window on a community’s history and culture. This is achieved specially through day-long events organized by community cultural institutions, which members of the public will be invited to attend.

The Litchfield Historical Society is planning to hold a community-wide digitization day in Spring 2017 aimed at gathering valuable stories, images, artifacts, and other material from the public for the town’s 300th anniversary, in 2019. At the event, experienced staff from the Connecticut State Library will work with LHS staff to digitize historical materials brought in by the public. Contributors will be given a free digital copy of their items to take home, along with the original materials. With the owner’s permission, digital copies of these materials will be included in the institutions’ collections. Historical photographs, artifacts, documents, family letters, art works, and audiovisual recordings are among the many items eligible for digitization and public commemoration. This model is based on the Connecticut State Library’s digitization for a state-wide WWI project.

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