STM Library receives a new grant!

The Seashore Trolley Museum, in partnership with York County Community College, has received a $1250 grant from the Maine Memory Network to create an online exhibit entitled “A Virtual Trolley Tour of Maine”. YCCC alum Christopher Carney will serve as the project’s Archival Intern. After attending YCCC, Chris received his Bachelor’s degree in History and Japanese Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and plans to pursue a graduate degree in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archival Management this fall. The project will take place over the summer at the YCCC Library, under the supervision of Amber Tatnall, Library Director. The online exhibit will consist of digitized historical photographs from the Museum’s collection, an exhibit narrative, and hand-drawn maps from the previously unpublished Atlas of Maine Trolleys. Watch for the exhibit’s unveiling on the Maine Memory Network in Fall 2011.

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.

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.

The grant project begins!

The much-anticipated check from the State of Maine arrived at the Seashore Trolley Museum last week. You know what that meant: shopping spree! We quickly ordered the supplies we needed to begin preserving the Maine Trolleys photo albums.

Below is Olivia Weiser, our Preservation Intern, working on the first album. Olivia has been a volunteer with the Museum for the past year. Olivia was our first pick to intern on the O.R. Cummings Photograph Collection preservation project because of her considerable skill with scrapbooking techniques.

Olivia will be remounting all of the photos, maps, and postcards onto archival cardstock and slipping them into archival protective sleeves. Descriptive information for each image will be printed out and placed on the facing page. Here is where all of the hard work of our Library volunteers begins to pay off!

Above: one of the completed pages for the Portland Railroad Company's Saco Division album. We have approximately 25 albums to complete for the grant project and plan to finish by early summer.

The Inventory Project

Here is the amazing Kaz Powell, doing data entry on the inventory sheets. She's entered over 1200 titles since the New Year. This is the beginning of an actual catalog of Seashore Trolley Museum Library holdings.

Kaz couldn't be doing this work without the inventory sheets that have been created by Mike Frost, Seashore volunteer extraordinaire! Mike has been almost single-handedly inventorying the collection, packing material up in boxes, and moving them to safer storage in the container. He's been so busy that we need to get two more containers to hold all of his work!

The Main Line, January 2010

The new issue of the Main Line is now available!

January 15, 2010 Work Party

We had a great work party on January 15 at York County Community College. Here is a photo of some of our volunteers: O.R. Cummings, front left; from left to right in the back row: Ed Ramsdell, Ed Dooks, Amber Tatnall, Karen Dooks, and Herb Pence. We are posing with the newly arrived and complete collection of O.R.'s research albums.

Do please note Herb's Mickey Mouse gloves which he loves to show off ;) What you can't see behind us is what keeps us going: delicious coffee and donuts from Congdon's and Karen's famous beef and barley soup.

Over the last few months, as we prepared for the grant project, the volunteers had been working with a small subset of the collection - just to get things started. Now, with the entire collection on campus, we are primed to Get Busy. Thanks to Donald Curry, the Seashore Trolley Museum shop manager, who has been housing the albums safely for several years. Thanks also to Ed Dooks and Randy Leclair for their assistance in transporting the collection to the College.

The volunteers have been very busy cataloging and describing the images in the albums, as we prepare for the actual grant project to begin. It's a big job: over 25 albums filled with photographs, postcards, maps, and ephemera. At this week's work party, we finished the cataloging and description for five of the albums. We had a great turnout of hard-working volunteers, including O.R. who provided oracular magic as usual! Funniest moment of the day: when Herb asked O.R. if he knew the name of the horse in the photograph. There was an actual pause while we all waited confidently for the answer. Best laugh of the week, Herb!

Here you see Ed and Karen with their completed albums. Only twenty something more to go! These folks work *so* hard!

The next step will be to enter all of that hard-won data into a database to create a finding aid, as well as to generate the descriptive pages that will face the newly mounted images in the archival albums. Today we created the database and began data entry.

Here's a screenshot. What can I say? I'm a database geek.

Submitted by Amber Tatnall