The Cook Memorial Library in Tamworth has been awarded a $15,000 grant through the Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan (SHARP) grant program offered by New Hampshire Humanities with funds allocated by the National Endowment for the Humanities from the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act. New Hampshire Humanities’ SHARP grants provide operational and programmatic support to help organizations recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The SHARP grant awarded to the Cook Memorial Library will provide a paid internship for a University of New Hampshire graduate student in the History program. The goal of hosting an intern at Cook Memorial Library is to increase use and awareness of the library’s local history collections, to improve access to the collections through digital means and exhibitions, and to support the future of the humanities in New Hampshire by highlighting some of the rich and varied history that is waiting to be discovered in small town library collections and by supporting a future historian and/or archivist.
The intern will review the Cook Memorial library’s local history collections and develop a project to highlight a chosen part of the collection and prepare a digital exhibit for the library’s online archive. To learn best practices for digital archives, the intern, along with the Library Director, will attend the online training “Digital Directions: Fundamentals of Creating and Managing Digital Collections” offered by the Northeast Document Conservation Center. The grant will also provide funds for a computer equipped with hardware and software to manage and prepare digitized files for the library’s online archive.
The library’s local history collections can be found at the library in the Ulitz History & Genealogy Center, which is open for researchers during the library’s regular hours. Digitized surrogates of the library’s historical collections and born digital historical records are beginning to be added to the library’s online archive at tamworthlibrary.omeka.net.
