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 White Plains, NY - Over 3,000 photographs of Playland Park were taken during the period of its early development and recreational use, 1927 -1941. Who has not seen and enjoyed the memorable images of depression-era families careening down the Dragon Coaster or frolicking along the Promenade.
With $30,621 in grant funds from the NYS Archives’ Local Government Records Management Improvement Fund, these historical images, as well as over 1,000 others from the relatively unknown, but equally important, John Gass Collection will be better preserved, identified and enjoyed. As a contract photographer for the county, Gass used his lens from the mid-1930s to the late 1960s to produce lyrical landscape photography that beautifully documents the world of mid-twentieth century suburbia. Now, both collections will be much easier to search and use.
A unit within the Dept. of Information Technology, the Archives has protected the Playland and Gass collections for decades in its environmentally controlled and secure vaults. But, researchers interested in viewing the photographs and selecting them for publication or video production had to physically visit the Archives to compare and contrast copies of them. Very often this resulted in handling the valuable prints and negatives themselves, contributing to their degradation.
The Archives & Records Center is now scanning the photographs and the state grant will pay for archival cataloging specialists to index the photographs for retrieval using specialized software. The resulting database will include all the cataloging metadata associated with the scanned images, making them very searchable once placed online.
Center Director Patty Dohrenwend added: “Not all of the collection will be placed online at www.westchesterarchives.com , but the index certainly will be. Plus, our reference room staff will have all these images at their fingertips and will be better able to assist our patrons in locating exactly what they need. We hope this particular project will be a pilot for improving overall public access to our collections.”
This grant was one of 330 awarded for the 2008-09 cycle of the the Local Government Records Management Improvement Fund (LGRMIF); 540 applications were received. The New York State Archives administers the program, which effectively redistributes dollars collected at the local level as part of the County Clerk filing fees. The LGRMIF supports records management and archives-related projects in local governments of all types and sizes throughout New York. In addition to the competitive grants program, the LGRMIF also supports disaster recovery grants. This particular award is #12 for Westchester County’s records program.
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