Friday, June 25, 2010

Gaining Ground


We've had a long and busy spring working with the Maine Trolley albums. Description of individual photographs continues, but our primary effort has been around preservation. With the help of Olivia and two new volunteers, Deb and Alicia, we have succeeded in passing the halfway point: 12 out of 24 albums are completely preserved! That means photocopying the original album, prepping the cataloging sheets and mounting pages, and then shifting the photos from the old albums to the new archival binders. We are going through tons of supplies - more than I anticipated. But oh, the binders are looking good! In the photo above, the blue binders on the top shelf are the completed albums.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Library volunteer receives award


On May 15, 2010, Mike Frost received a Trustee Recognition Award from the New England Electric Railway Historical Society in honor of his devotion and invaluable service to the Seashore Trolley Museum Library. In January 2009, Mike Frost began the task of inventorying and packing over 1000 books held by the Seashore Trolley Museum Library. This activity involved removing the books from various boxes or loose piles in the old library building, filling out a data sheet, including a location code for the volumes’ new storage location. Mike sorted books for appropriate storage (permanent collection versus those outside of the Library collection’s scope), packing them accordingly. He also moved the vast majority of these books by himself to the safety of the library container. Mike’s efforts have helped to rescue the collection from the environmental threats posed by the old Library structure and have also made possible a computerized inventory of these materials. This computerized inventory will ultimately become the searchable catalog of the Seashore Trolley Museum Library.