Photographs and documents compromise a major portion of the digital collection, and Delaware Historical Society chief curator Leigh Rifenburg says not everything will be digitized.
"There are certain things that are simply too fragile already to be digitized, and so we don't want to compromise those items. There are certain things that aren't necessarily of particular interest that we would make a priority for digitization. So we're really looking for things that are of the greatest visual interest, for instance a lot of our photographs are wonderful candidates for digitization," said Rifenburg.
Rifenburg adds that taking the collection online was always part of their plans, but the pandemic provided incentive to do it quicker.
"The pandemic certainly was a factor although access is one of our core goals here at the Delaware Historical Society, and it is something that we've been thinking about for a long time,” said Rifenburg. “But we were
able to pair with a wonderful program called Force for Good - which is sponsored by JP Morgan Chase - to be able to really sort of work with an experienced tech team to help us with our digitizing and create a mechanism for sharing and storing those materials for people to access easily."
Digitizing the collection is a work in progress with more being added each month.
To explore Delaware’s past online- you can visit the Delaware Historical Society's digital platform.
