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BEFORE FEDERAL SOCIAL-WELFARE PROGRAMS: WALLA WALLA COUNTY WELFARE DEPARTMENT ANNUAL REPORT TO COUNTY COMMISSIONERS, 1943

BEFORE FEDERAL SOCIAL-WELFARE PROGRAMS: WALLA WALLA COUNTY WELFARE DEPARTMENT ANNUAL REPORT TO COUNTY COMMISSIONERS, 1943

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In the era before federal social-welfare programs, states and their individual counties had to do the job themselves. This effort is the focus of the Walla Walla County Welfare Department’s 1943 Annual Report to County Commissioners.  The report starts by listing the employee names of the department’s administrative unit and those assigned to various facilities and programs. Aside from the administrative unit, the report lists the Stone Creek Sanitarium, the Blue Mountain sanitarium, the Medical Aid program, and the Old…

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FLICKER AND TAD: A MOTHER-DAUGHTER STORY FROM PARADISE COVE, VASHON ISLAND, WASHINGTON

FLICKER AND TAD: A MOTHER-DAUGHTER STORY FROM PARADISE COVE, VASHON ISLAND, WASHINGTON

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In celebration of Mother’s Day, Washington Rural Heritage is looking back on a fascinating document from the Vashon Island Heritage Collection: a lovingly detailed scrapbook compiled by Florence “Flicker” Burd for her daughter Florence “Tad” Burd. Documenting their life from 1923 to 1927, the scrapbook documents the mother and daughter’s journey from Michigan to Seattle by rail when Tad was just four and Florence a recently separated single mother. Upon arriving in the Pacific Northwest, they spent several months at…

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WASHINGTON STATE ARCHIVES: PROCESSING AND RESTORING LEGISLATIVE AUDIO RECORDINGS

WASHINGTON STATE ARCHIVES: PROCESSING AND RESTORING LEGISLATIVE AUDIO RECORDINGS

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Washington State Archives’ Legislative Audio Project team digitizes, converts, edits, and indexes audio from House Floor sessions, Senate Committee meetings, and other recordings associated with the state’s legislative history. This recorded media document events spanning over half a century and are available online at Washington State Archives – Digital Archives. Consequently, recording technologies, as well as the quality of these recordings, vary greatly from year to year. For example, the majority of House Floor sessions from 1969 through 1996 were…

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SPRING CLEANING AT THE STATE LIBRARY

SPRING CLEANING AT THE STATE LIBRARY

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Do you have old or obsolete electronic devices stored somewhere in your home that you haven’t used in a long time? What about a box of mysterious, tangled cords that may or may not connect to things you’ve long since discarded? We do. Libraries, often much like the patrons and communities they serve, also accumulate things like this, and the Washington State Library is no exception. Recently, however, the State Library finally bid farewell to some old stalwarts: our mechanical…

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WASHINGTON DIGITAL HERITAGE GRANT RECIPIENT PROJECTS HELP DOCUMENT AND SHARE WASHINGTON HISTORY

WASHINGTON DIGITAL HERITAGE GRANT RECIPIENT PROJECTS HELP DOCUMENT AND SHARE WASHINGTON HISTORY

Each year, Washington State Library awards grants to libraries across the state for digital projects that document and share Washington’s rich and unique history. The 2021-2022 Washington Digital Heritage Grant awardees recently wrapped up their projects. This year’s grants encompassed a wide range of topics and mediums, from Nez Perce stories and legends to the Grand Coulee Dam. Grant recipients scanned images, created thesauri, recorded interviews, and much more. Read on to learn more about the awardees’ recently completed projects….

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NEW NORTHWEST DIGITAL HERITAGE SEARCH ENGINE ENABLES EASIER ACCESS TO PACIFIC NORTHWEST CONTENT

NEW NORTHWEST DIGITAL HERITAGE SEARCH ENGINE ENABLES EASIER ACCESS TO PACIFIC NORTHWEST CONTENT

Northwest Digital Heritage is proud to present its DPLA Local site, a new search portal that enables users to more easily access materials digitized by over 150 institutions in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. At the DPLA local site (https://nwdh.dp.la/), visitors can discover over half-a-million electronic documents, photos, maps, oral histories, and much more. The site enables users to narrow their search results across a variety of categories, including copyright status, location, contributing institution, and much more. Additionally, DPLA Local highlights…

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Washington Digital Newspapers Collection Exceeds Half a Million Pages!

Washington Digital Newspapers Collection Exceeds Half a Million Pages!

Washington State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State, recently wrapped up several large digitization projects and achieved some significant milestones that expanded its Washington Digital Newspapers (WDN) online collection to over 500,000 newspaper pages. The WDN program selects historic newspapers, prepares them for online searching, and hosts them on the Library’s WDN website as a free public resource. Visitors to the website will find Washington newspapers from the state’s territorial days through the early 2000s,…

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INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY — LANGLEY, WASHINGTON, 100 YEARS AGO: WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY — LANGLEY, WASHINGTON, 100 YEARS AGO: WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP

From 1920 to 1922, an all-woman cohort of councilmembers and mayor governed the town of Langley on Whidbey Island, Washington. Langley has the distinction of being the second town in the United States to elect an all-woman administration. Helen Coe served as mayor during this period. In July 1921, she purchased and deeded land to the Ladies’ Civic Improvement Club to erect a community building, which would include a public library, auditorium, and reading rooms. The 100-year-old library, now part…

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DEER IN THE HEADLINES

DEER IN THE HEADLINES

A herd of reindeer in Seattle? It happened. These reindeer, photographed in Seattle, may have been part of a government relief effort in the winter of 1897-1898. The expedition was launched when news reached the public that numerous miners, lured to Alaska in the hopes of striking it rich during the Klondike Gold Rush, were stranded in Dawson City, Canada, with supply lines cut off for the winter. If these reindeer were part of that expedition, they and their herders…

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HARVEST SEASON: 50,000 ADDITIONAL RECORDS SHIPPED TO THE DPLA

HARVEST SEASON: 50,000 ADDITIONAL RECORDS SHIPPED TO THE DPLA

It’s harvest season, and Northwest Digital Heritage recently reaped and baled 50,000 more records and shipped them to the Digital Public Library of America! This metadata harvest garnered: More than 40,000 records from the State Library of Oregon’s Government Publications Highlights include COVID-19 information in over 40 languages and an excellent video on hop production in Oregon. Baker County Library District’s Digital Archive Highlights include landscape and mining scenes from Oregon’s Elkhorn Mountains, and Baker City’s Main Street from the…

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