Archives.com Awards Grant to Preserve Oral History

by Julie Hill

Posted on November 4, 2011

Pictured: Abigail Budzynski, Adult Services Assistant Department Head, Tim Jarzemsky, Library Director, and Leslie Drewitz, Local History Assistant

Pictured: Abigail Budzynski, Adult Services Assistant Department Head, Tim Jarzemsky, Library Director, and Leslie Drewitz, Local History Assistant

We're excited to announce the most recent Archives.com Grant recipient: the Bloomingdale Public Library in Bloomingdale, Illinois. The library will use the grant to further their oral history project, which aims to record and preserve the memories of Bloomingdale community members.

The Village of Bloomingdale, home to about 22,000 people, is located 28 miles west of Chicago. The library's oral history project will be especially valuable to Bloomingdale as it will preserve memories of older community members that might otherwise be lost forever. The project, which had been delayed due to budget constraints, will be able to continue thanks to the $1,000 grant.

Specifically, the grant will allow the library to pay staff to finish transcribing the project's existing oral histories, to record more oral histories, and to purchase digital media for a permanent archive.

"This grant means a lot to our community," said Julie Keating, head of the Adult Services Department at the Bloomingdale Public Library. "Many thanks to Archives.com for helping us achieve our goal of making history come alive for our residents."

The oral history project finds its home in the library's Local History Room, an area of the library dedicated to collections of manuscripts, photographs, and published materials related to the history of the Village of Bloomingdale. The oral history project will be a great resource for family history researchers now and in the future.

Archives is honored to have awarded thousands of dollars this year to projects related to genealogy and historical preservation. Congratulations to the Bloomingdale Public Library! We applaud your mission of digitizing and preserving oral histories from today's communities for future generations of family history researchers.

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