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Vol. 30:4 ISSN 0160-8460 December 2002
The New Hampshire Local Records Education Project at Dartmouth College
by Daniel Daily
In May 2001, the NHPRC recommended funding the New Hampshire Local Records Education Project (NHLREP) at Dartmouth College. Since September 2001, the project has sought to provide archival education and assistance to local governments, historical societies, and libraries throughout New Hampshire. So far, the project has reached about 170 local records keepers through workshops, and has awarded professional preservation assessments to 40 New Hampshire municipalities and organizations. As the grant approaches its conclusion in May 2003, workshops and preservation assessments continue.
Although this endeavor is called the New Hampshire Local Records Education Project, it is much more than that. The project's genesis was at the intersection of New Hampshire's need for education and assistance to local records keepers and Dartmouth College's continuing service to New Hampshire. As James Wright, historian and president of Dartmouth College, stated, ". . . New Hampshire hews to a political tradition which favors limited government involvement in local affairs. In such a situation, the many towns and counties which hold some of the most precious materials documenting the state's history are without access to the expertise necessary to help preserve them. Dartmouth has the necessary expertise and history, indeed a sense of obligation, which leads us to wish to offer all the support we can."
Endeavoring to meet this need with funding from the NHPRC as well as matching funds from Dartmouth College, the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, the Putnam Foundation, and other sources, Anne Ostendarp, former Dartmouth College archivist and project director, launched NHLREP in September 2001. Julie Blain, the Special Collections Library administrative assistant and project registrar, began coordinating the arrangements for the workshops. By December 2001, project archivist Daniel Daily offered the first series of historical records preservation workshops. Now, a year later, the project has offered 15 workshops focusing on the preservation of records, records management, and developing collection management policies and practices.
The curriculum developed and used for the workshops will be available on the NHLREP web site by May 2003. The three modules are: The Essentials of Preserving Historical Records; Stewardship: Collecting and Making Historical Records Available in Historical Societies and Libraries; and Records Management and Archives for Local Governments. These materials will be available to all who wish to use them. Please visit the web site at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nhlrep/.
Audience at the Sanbornton Historical Document Foundation's Community Historical Forum, held on October 29, 2002, in the Sanbornton Town Hall. Photograph courtesy of the Sanbornton Historical Document Foundation.
Attendance at the workshops has varied from around 10 participants at locations north of the White Mountains to approximately 30 in the southern cities of Concord and Nashua. When designing the project, both Ostendarp and Daily were intent on offering workshops all over the state. The following comment affirmed the conviction that the educational opportunities should be statewide.
"I was very pleased that this workshop took place in Berlin. Usually we have to travel to get to a workshop. Thank you!"
-Yvette Bilodeau, Town Clerk in Errol (NH). Errol is between Berlin and the Canadian border.
In addition to the workshops, the project offers participants the opportunity to request a preservation needs assessment on behalf of their organization. The assessments are an integral part of the project and are intended to reinforce and augment what people learn at the workshops. To date, the project has awarded 40 assessments to local governments, public libraries, and historical societies. Each of these bodies has, at no cost to them, the professional services (for up to 3 days) of a consulting archivist. Under the auspices of the project, eight New Hampshire archivists are conducting assessments throughout the state. The following comment reflects the positive responses to the workshops and assessments.
"What was a source of frustration has become enjoyable."
-Diane Mitton, of the Thompson-Ames Historical Society in Gilford (NH), referring to the T-AHS collections and what she learned through the New Hampshire Local Records Education Project workshop series and preservation assessment.
As the project embarks on a final series of workshops, planning is also underway for a survey of all the local records keepers who participated in the project. Jason Warren, a recent Dartmouth graduate, is assisting the project and designing a survey instrument that promises to gauge the overall effectiveness of the project and demonstrate where future efforts are needed. While Dartmouth College cannot single-handedly sustain statewide archival education, it does seek to provide information to state agencies and other organizations that are interested in future archival education endeavors.
Since September 2001, others in New Hampshire have endeavored to meet the need of preserving local historical records and local history. These efforts run parallel to NHLREP, and owe their beginnings not to NHLREP, but to the hard work of others in the state. Nevertheless, Dartmouth has had the privilege of serving as a preservation resource. At the state level, the New Hampshire legislature passed a bill to create a local government records program at the State Archives. Ostendarp and Daily had the opportunity to speak with legislators who developed the bill. Furthermore, two local initiatives, the Upper Valley History Network, www.uppervalleyhistory.net/, and the Sanbornton Historical Document Foundation, http://sanbornton.com/, have looked to NHLREP as a resource.
The Upper Valley History Network developed almost spontaneously as historical society members from the Upper Connecticut River Valley region realized they could all benefit by sharing information. This occurred at an NHLREP workshop in Hanover during the spring of 2002. The Sanbornton Historical Document Foundation seeks to create a digital library of local history sources from Sanbornton, which is located in New Hampshire's Lakes Region. Daily had the privilege of delivering a presentation entitled "A Hearse, Daniel Webster's Socks, and the Box at the Doorstep: In Search of Local History" to about 30 people at its first Community Historical Forum.
When developing the grant proposal, Dartmouth looked back to the New England Archivists' education project that was hosted at the University of Connecticut in the early 1990s. As with the NEA/University of Connecticut project, Dartmouth College saw a need for grassroots archival education and how the academy could meet that need. Perhaps other institutions will look back to the New Hampshire Local Records Education Project as they seek to assist communities in caring for an important part of our nation's historical fabric-local history.
Daniel Daily is NHLREP's project archivist.
