A NEW era in pictorial history has come to the Great Lakes region, with a free digital database of over 1000 historical photographs now available to the public for the first time, online.
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The digital collection is easy to navigate and search through, thanks to the innovative contribution from the Powerhouse Library to the Great Lakes Museum’s 14-month project.
The clickHistory website launch took place at Forster Library last week, and was introduced by council’s library IT coordinator Peter Flemming.
“While a picture paints a thousand words, we’ve done far more than just putting up great quality images. There’s been a team of people who worked tirelessly to research and document the photos and we’ve been able to incorporate all that information into each record,” Mr Flemming said.
Mr Flemming added that the new collection has some powerful features, with images scanned at a very high resolution to allow for zooming right in to fine levels of detail.
“This enabled us to uncover previously unknown facts,” he said.
The Great Lakes Museum believes that digital collections will be the way of the future for museums.
“We were very keen on the idea,” said the museum’s president Alan Wright.
“It’s the way museums will be going. It’s certainly the biggest project we’ve ever undertaken, and it will go on forever. This is just for the photos. Next up will be the objects. It’s an ongoing project that will never finish.”
It is a potentially overwhelming thought. A major grant from the State Library of NSW and collaboration between the local library and the museum brought the project to fruition, with community involvement taking place through feedback and the identification of subjects in photographs.
Contributions were also facilitated through the Great Lakes Advocate, which has been publishing a weekly mystery snapshot to generate feedback from residents for each image. Such a localised response is expected to continue as people interact with the collection and add comments to each photograph online.
The collection is a snapshot of the region’s history. To browse through its digital corridors, go to http://library.greatlakes.nsw.gov.au/libhist/WebOpac.cls