Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Culture topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Encinitas Historical Society outlines plan to digitize schoolhouse archives and make local history accessible
Summary
The Encinitas Historical Society described a volunteer‑driven archiving project to catalog and digitize thousands of local historical materials and to create a searchable database for public use at the 1883 schoolhouse.
Hillel Schwartz, archivist for the Encinitas Historical Society, gave a roughly 20‑minute presentation describing an ongoing project to catalog, photograph, digitize and index a broad collection housed in the 1883 schoolhouse above Pacific View. The society's holdings include thousands of photographs and negatives, oral history interviews (cassette and videotape), newspapers, maps, yearbooks and ephemera documenting Encinitas, Leucadia and nearby communities.
Schwartz said volunteers (more than a dozen) and recent grant funding from San Diego County enabled the group to install a new database, use a Turboscribe voice‑to‑text service for transcription, scan thousands of images and convert hundreds of negatives into positives. The society plans a two‑year goal to complete digital indexing and to provide computer access to the catalog at the schoolhouse, along with teaching and research resources. Volunteers reported creation of an authority file with roughly 12,000 names appearing in historical records and progress scanning historical transcripts and oral histories.
Council members thanked the Historical Society for its volunteer work and called the archive a community resource for students, residents and researchers. Deputy Mayor Lyons and others noted the society's long partnership with the city for the annual tree lighting and encouraged continued collaboration on accessible public programming.
The presentation concluded with a request for the council to continue supporting partnerships and to encourage public use of the planned digital archive.
