Huron County Library Digitization Program Comes to an End as Funding Runs Out

by Bob Montgomery

Huron County's Director of Cultural Services presented her final report on their Digitization project earlier this month.

Beth Rumble told council the Digitization project started in 2014 with a goal of improving access to a large volume of local newspapers. She points out digitizing the newspapers made them word searchable and available any time of the night or day. A couple of years ago, when they had digitized most of the newspapers they transitioned to some of the archival collections they have at the museum and that was funded partially through a grant from the Department of Canadian Heritage. “We were able to digitize photographs, historic diaries, census records and historical videos and that allowed them to provide a bit more diversity in the stories they were telling through the different mediums.”

Rumble says there's certainly lots of material in their collection that hasn't been digitized but the grant funding has ended so they no longer have the funds to keep a staff person in place to digitize those materials, so for the time being they aren't doing any more digitization. “However we have heard through the community that it is certainly valuable and useful to them as a research tool. We also know there's a benefit in having that duplicate copy should anything happen to the original, we would still have that information, so there are items we could still digitize if we could find the funds.”

Rumble says the funding came from the province initially and later from the federal government, and the county also provided some of the funding but for now there is no funding and the program is on hold until that changes.