Tuesday, November 12, the Office of the Secretary of State and its division, the Washington State Library, joined Microsoft in launching a joint adventure, the Washington State Library / Microsoft IT Academy with an event at the KCLS – Bellevue Library. This online technology training program will be offered in more than 385 Washington libraries, free of charge, thanks to funding by the Washington Legislature.

State Librarian Rand Simmons noted that the program furthered the state’s embrace of 21st Century technology. “It will help average people get family-wage jobs by attaining the technology skills they need.”

Secretary of State Kim Wyman said that through the partnership with Microsoft, “we have the ability to serve the people of Washington in an entirely new way by both enhancing learning and creating job opportunities.” Wyman requested the 2013 Legislature provide $1.5 million over the biennium for the State Library to purchase statewide online access to the IT Academy.

Washington residents through their local public, community and technical college, and tribal libraries can access 250 courses. Courses are offered on three basic levels: digital literacy, for those who need basic skills such as using a mouse or sending emails; e-learning courses that support Microsoft Office suites; and courses leading to professional technology certifications. Certification is available but at cost to the participant over the biennium for the State Library to purchase statewide online access to the IT Academy.

“It is a natural fit,” Simmons observed, “for this program to be offered through libraries. They have a long record of providing training to their communities. People are accustomed to turning to their libraries for assistance and vital information.”

“Libraries continue to innovate and evolve in exciting and helpful ways,” Simmons stated. “This is just one more piece of evidence that libraries continue to play vital roles within their communities.”

A second launch will be held on Wednesday, November 13, 10:30 a.m., at the Spokane Public Library. For more information, see this press release from Office of the Secretary of State.

The Washington Rural Heritage initiative is pleased to announce a new digital collection: North Olympic Heritage.

A project of the Port Angeles Main Library of the North Olympic Library System, this collection includes hundreds of photographs of pioneers, Native Americans, trains, ships, logging scenes, and views of early towns and sites in Clallam and Jefferson counties digitized from the expansive Bert Kellogg Photograph Collection.

In 1970, local resident Bert Kellogg donated his collection of over 5,000 photos and negatives depicting life on the Olympic Peninsula during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the North Olympic Library System. Kellogg amassed the collection by borrowing and copying images from families and individuals, and by combing through rummage sales for prints and negatives during a 30 year period. Until now, access to this great collection has largely been limited to those who are able to visit the Port Angeles Library in person.

Working on a Washington Rural Heritage grant and leveraging a fairly robust pre-existing Access database, local project manager Rebecca Nugent and her staff (thanks, Tim!) at the Port Angeles Library have managed to digitize approximately 25 percent of the Bert Kellogg Collection in a single year — a huge feat resulting in 1158 digital items!

Highlights from the digital collection include:

• Amazing views of the construction of (the recently removed) Lower Elwha and Glines Canyon Dams (also known as the Upper Elwha Dam).
• The early days of the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony, a Utopian socialist settlement near present day Port Angeles.
• Early 20th century views of the Olympic Hot Springs resort.
• Over 420 geo-located images of Port Angeles street scenes, views of Ediz Hook, the Elwha River and more!
• Post offices made ‘the Pacific Northwest way‘ — from cedar tree stumps!

Following this initial project, the Port Angeles Main Library has recently been awarded another Washington Rural Heritage grant for the 2013-2014 year to continue digitizing images from the Bert Kellogg Collection. Look for more great images as they add to this rich digital collection over the winter and spring.

It’s National Library Week at the Washington State Library and across our great country.

What is Library Development at the Washington State Library? In a nutshell, library development staff members provide “Services to Libraries.” The purpose of our work is to serve the residents of the State of Washington through their local library. We work with all types of libraries; public libraries, academic libraries, school libraries, and special libraries. We serve these libraries through the implementation of statewide projects, by providing training opportunities for those who work in Washington libraries, and through the award of grants to local libraries for the start-up of new services or the enhancement of existing services. We provide any number of additional services to libraries — read more about these services here.

Our work is dependent on the receipt of federal Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. As such, we would like to recognize and thank the President and members of Congress for their continued support of both IMLS and LSTA. We also need to recognize and thank the staff members who support this federal program at the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

The funding Congress provides and the work done by both IMLS and the Washington State Library supports local libraries in opening the world of information and ideas to our communities across Washington.

Throughout today we will share brief overviews of the work we do through Facebook and Twitter.

Follow what is happening nationally this week using the Twitter hashtag #nlw13, or through the American Library Association, atyourlibrary.org.

We are proud to announce Lincoln County Heritage — a small, yet very cool new digital collection from Washington Rural Heritage — as well as a brand new website for the Davenport Public Library!

The Davenport Library’s new web presence, built on a Drupal content management platform by our own Evelyn Lindberg, was developed as part of the Washington ReadyWeb Project (WaRP). Davenport joins the Reardan Memorial Library, the Ritzville Public Library, and the Denny Ashby Library in Pomeroy who all have a new and powerful, yet easy to use website from the WaRP initiative.

Irrigation ditch at Peach

Lincoln County Heritage, a collaboration between the Lincoln County Historical Museum (LCHM) and the Davenport Public Library, is our latest digital collection which came together through the help of Davenport librarian Katy Pike and LCHM staffer Tannis Jeschke, with imaging assistance from Washington Rural Heritage staff.

Highlights from the collection include:

• Late 19th century images of the U.S. Army at Fort Spokane.

• Early 20th century images of the community of Peach, Washington, along the lower Spokane River — one of many towns in northern Lincoln County submerged by the rising waters of Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake, following the completion of the Grand Coulee Dam in the early 1940s.

Foot bridge over the Spokane River narrows

For more information about Washington Rural Heritage, contact Evan Robb, Project Manager: (360)704-5228, [email protected]; or Ross Fuqua, Digital Projects Librarian: (360)570-5587, [email protected].

For more information about Washington WebReady Project (WaRP), please contact Evelyn Lindberg, Project Manager: (360)704-5228, [email protected].

Sometimes a seemingly insignificant coincidence can turn into a meaningful connection… or at least send you down a rabbit hole of late-night Googling.

A few weeks ago, I was visiting the Davenport, Washington public library for a couple days with Washington Rural Heritage (WRH) Project Manager Evan Robb. We were there helping Davenport librarian Katy Pike develop a small digital collection through a partnership with the Lincoln County Historical Museum.

After two productive days scanning photographs and documents we packed up our gear and were getting ready to leave when Tannis Jeschke of the Lincoln County Museum pulled out one last photo. The image, from the 1910s or 1920s, showed two children posed in a cart being pulled by… a goat. We all laughed at the humorous image, and I lamented the fact that we’d already loaded our scanner and laptops into the car.

Katy Pike took another look at the goat cart photo and said, “Hmm… at home, I have a very similar photo of my grandmother sitting in a goat cart just like this one.” I asked where the photo of her grandmother was taken and she believed it was somewhere in the greater Spokane area. We all agreed this must have been from the same photographer and most likely the same goat and cart. We headed home and forgot about goat carts….. until….

A week later we were helping Susan Johns and Lissa Duvall of Whatcom County Library System finalize their brand new WRH collection, Nooksack Valley Heritage, when we noticed this goat cart image (below), taken in Bellingham in 1928.

Three goat carts within a single week seemed too good to be true… So I starting looking online for more.

As it turns out, the goat cart was a common device for traveling photographers to use for soliciting business to create portrait photography and photo postcards, from the late 19th century through the 1920s.

This kind of image was at one time so prevalent, in fact, the Library of Congress has included Goat carts as a controlled term in their Thesaurus of Graphic Materials – the same controlled vocabulary we use to provide subject access to materials within Washington Rural Heritage Collections. Our cursory research has turned up goat cart images from all across the United States, from New England to the Deep South, and throughout the Midwest and Western States.

This fun discovery has also moved us to try out the social bookmarking tool Pinterest at WSL to “collect” images of goat carts from other digital collections and sources around the Web. Check it out and follow our ‘Goat Carts’ Pinterest board.

Our Internet friends at HistoryPin have also jumped on the goat cart, er, bandwagon this week, too. They’ve started a collection of geo-referenced goat cart images featuring our Nooksack Valley image, as well as one made as far away as Brisbane, Australia! If you have not yet played around with HistoryPin, we encourage you to check out this amazing, crowd-sourced resource.

Asotin County Library has recently added over 100 newly digitized photographs to the Asotin County Heritage collection with the assistance of a grant from the State Library’s Washington Rural Heritage initiative!

Oliver Brodock poses with his cat outside his service garage in the Silcott area of Asotin County, Washington, 1940.

Asotin County Library director Jennifer Ashby and cataloger/metadata specialist Marjean Riggers partnered with local resident Eva Lynn Thomson this year to digitize a portion of Thomson’s family collection, documenting the history of the Wilson Banner Ranch and the Silcott area along the Snake River just west of Clarkston, Washington.

In 2010, the Asotin County Library and the Asotin County Museum joined over 65 cultural institutions throughout the state that have digitized material with grants from the Washington Rural Heritage initiative. Grant funds are available  to public and tribal libraries serving populations under 25,000, funded through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Packing crew at White Brothers & Crum Orchards, 1910.

If you have comments or additional information about any of the items in the Asotin County Heritage collection — or would like to contribute your own material for digitization — please contact the Asotin County Library.

And keep an eye out for a number of new Washington Rural Heritage projects to be published in the coming weeks! Find out more (or subscribe to this blog) right here.

It has already been a busy year for Washington Rural Heritage.

iris0105. Cataloging in progress.

In addition to launching a newly-designed website this spring (with upgrades to our server and content management system), we have improved our long-term digital preservation strategy to better protect our collections for future generations. We have also recently re-opened our metadata to outside harvesters (using best practices established by the Open Archives Initiative, or OAI), and we are currently in the process of contributing over 19,000 item-level records to OCLC’s WorldCat online catalog, enhanching discovery of WRH collections to library patrons across the world.

Congratulations are in order for the latest group of Washington libraries who will receive LSTA grants (FY 2012) through the Washington Rural Heritage initiative!

• Denny Ashby Public Library
• Nisqually Tribal Library
• Port Angeles Public Library, North Olympic Library System
• Ritzville Library District #2
• Roslyn Public Library
• Sedro-Woolley Public Library
• Sno-Isle Libraries

These organizations will spend the next year digitizing historically significant materials from their own holdings, the holdings of partnering heritage institutions, and in some cases, privately held collections. Read more on each project here.

Libraries currently participating in grant-funded digitization projects this year (FY 2011) will wrap up and launch their new collections or sub-collections in the coming weeks, including Asotin County Library, the Connell Branch of Mid-Columbia Libraries, Ellensburg Public Library, Odessa Public Library, North Central Regional Library, Roslyn Public Library, and the Everson Branch of Whatcom County Library System. Look for announcements here as these new projects come online.

Funds for Washington Rural Heritage are made available by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. For more information, contact Evan Robb, Project Manager, (360) 704-5228.

The Odessa Public Library and the Odessa Historisches Museum have continued their partnership this year with a Washington Rural Heritage sub-grant to digitize a wealth of cultural heritage materials, including some cool multimedia. This slideshow interprets the story of the settling of the Odessa area by Germans from Russia, who came to eastern Washington starting in the late 19th century, as well as the difficult yet tenacious history of the Odessa Historical Society and Historisches Museum.

With an interest in photography, film and audio recording, the Historisches Museum’s founder, John E. Gahringer, MD, produced the slideshow in the 1980s from 272 images made on Kodachrome and Ektachrome 35mm slide film, and created an accompanying narrative on audio cassette with a synchronized cue track. The cue track allowed certain slide projectors, like the Telex Caramate 4000 shown in the short video below, to advance through slides automatically.

After a failed attempt to capture the essence of the (malfunctioning) Caramate projector for posterity, Washington State Library staff digitized the slideshow’s components and have reconstructed the presentation in video form. Watch the trailer above for a quick introduction, or see the full length presentation here.

We are very pleased to announce the Asotin County Library and the Asotin County Museum have become the latest contributing institutions to the Washington Rural Hertiage initiative!

C.M. Evans store on Main Street in Clarkston, Washington

With nearly 200 items to date, the Asotin County Heritage collection presents images, maps, records, and artifacts from Clarkston, Asotin, Anatone, Washington, and the surrounding area including Lewiston, Idaho. The collection was made possible by a Washington Rural Heritage grant from the Washington State Library, funded by the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) through the Federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

According to Jennifer Ashby, Director of the Asotin County Library, “The Rural Heritage project has enabled us to bring together items from private collections as well as the museum and library and to make them available to anyone, anywhere. In addition, it provides a way to preserve these materials for future generations. We will continue to add to the collection as materials become available to us.”

Some collection highlights include:

• Nez Perce tools and beadwork
• Agricultural implements and artifacts
• A collection of regional cattle brands
• Early buildings in Clarkston
• Aerial photographs of Clarkston, Asotin, and the Port of Wilma
• Several local histories on the area
• Historic postcards
• Items regarding the impact of the Lower Granite Dam

Beaver skin hat worn by Jackson Sundown, member of the Nez Perce & a world champion bronc rider, 1916 Pendleton (Oregon) Roundup.

Marjean Riggers, Allisha Parot, and Jennifer Ashby, all of Asotin County Library completed their initial digitization efforts with the assistance of a 2010 Washington Rural Heritage grant from the Washington State Library. Through an additional grant, they will begin digitizing another photograph collection this year loaned to the Library by a local resident which documents the history of the Silcott area and the Wilson Banner Ranch.

The Asotin County Library and the Asotin County Museum join more than 65 cultural institutions throughout the state that have digitized material with assistance from the Washington Rural Heritage initiative. These collections include historic photos, texts, objects & artifacts, and audiovisual materials that were, in some cases, previously inaccessible.  To date, Washington Rural Heritage has published 22 collections including more than 10,000 unique items which document local history from every corner of the state.

If you have comments or additional information about any of the items in the Asotin County Heritage Collection, or would like to contribute your own material for digitization, please contact the Asotin County Public Library or Asotin County Museum.

Staff at the Whitman County Library, a Washington Rural Heritage participant, have been hard at work this summer and fall adding almost 200 more items to the Whitman County Heritage digital collection.

Many images of natural disasters in the region — including the Palouse River Flood of 1910 and the aftermath of the 1980 Mount Saint Helens eruption —  are now accessible online, as well as early images from the very small communities of Ewan and Revere, Washington, west of St. John.

The  Athenaeum Club and the private collection of Bob Bowen have also become sources of historic images and material for Whitman County Heritage this year, contributing to an already wonderful and rich digital collection. We salute Patti Cammack and staff of Whitman County Library for their continued effort in providing access to these important resources through the Washington Rural Heritage project.