Divided loyalties audio tour panel 36

Missouri Digital Heritage :: Divided Loyalties Opening Exhibit :: Divided Loyalties Audio Tour :: Panel 36 - Document Preservation - (Digitizing Civil War Documents, Preserving Civil War Era Court Cases, Local Records Program)


Divided Loyalties Audio Tour
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[ Audio Transcript ]

Panel 36 - Document Preservation

 

- Digitizing Civil War Documents, Preserving Civil War Era Court Cases, Local Records Program -

 

Documents of lasting historical significance are susceptible to fire, water, oxidization, and the natural decomposition that comes with aging. It is the job of archivists to preserve and provide access to these records.

 

  • One way to provide access to records is to digitize them. One of the photos featured on this panel shows Imaging Technician Stacey White using a planetary scanner to make a digital copy of a Civil War document. These documents are available to the public at no cost on the State Archives' Missouri Digital Heritage website, www.sos.mo.gov/mdh.

 

  • Archivists use humidity and gentle pressure to flatten documents that have been folded, as shown in the photograph on this panel. This process was used on many of the more than 230,000 St. Louis court documents from the Civil War era that have been preserved by the State Archives.

 

  • Field archivists from the Missouri State Archives Local Records Program help local government agencies evaluate and preserve documents in their collections. The Civil War era map of the city of Palmyra featured on this panel is one of the many documents that have been conserved in the archives lab.

This concludes the audio tour of "Divided Loyalties: Civil War Documents from the Missouri State Archives." We hope you enjoyed your time with us today. If you would like to explore these documents further, please go to www.missouridigitalheritage.com or call the State Archives at 573-751-3280. For more information about Wolfner Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, please call 1-800-392-2614 or visit www.sos.mo.gov/wolfner.



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