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thelibrary.org Springfield-Greene County Library District Springfield, Missouri

Library, Partners Win National Award for World War I Project

June 6, 2016 — The Springfield-Greene County Library District and several partners statewide have won a prestigious national award for their project “Over There: Missouri & the Great War.” The partners created www.missourioverthere.org as a single digital archive, unifying the state’s World War I resources and telling the stories of Missouri’s role in World War I. It was the first statewide digitization project for the war’s centennial.

The Library, the Missouri History Museum, Museum of Osteopathic Medicine, the National World War I Museum and Memorial, and the State Historical Society of Missouri were selected as the 2016 Award of Merit winners by the American Association for State and Local History.

The Nashville-based awards program is the nation’s most prestigious competition for recognition of achievement in state and local history, said the association’s Bethany L. Hawkins. It bestows the awards to establish and encourage standards of excellence in the collection, preservation and interpretation of state and local history to make the past more meaningful to all Americans.

Missouri Over There set out to enhance the understanding of Missouri’s role in World War I both at home and abroad by expanding access to historical collections for students, scholars and lifelong learners, said Brian Grubbs, manager of the Library’s Local History & Genealogy Department.

“It is such a great honor to have the project recognized by the American Association for State and Local History,” said Grubbs.

The project is made possible by a Library Services and Technology Act Digital Imaging Grant funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and coordinated by the Missouri State Library.

The Library served as the fiscal agent and lead institution for the project. It reached collaborative agreements with 32 additional organizations and individuals across Missouri, incorporating their World War I collections into the project. The project provided staff to digitize the collections; thus allowing institutions without digitization experience, equipment, or staffing to participate in this project at no cost to them.

Project staff have digitized 225 World War I collections, totaling nearly 22,000 pages of primary source material for the project. Currently, 51 collections are available through the website, with the remainder to be uploaded shortly. The site also features scholarly essays by leading experts in World War I history.

Project partners developed a virtual service database compiling government and personal records for the 156,000 Missouri men and women who served in the war. The database combines photographs, obituaries, biographical sketches, and military records. The service database enables individuals to contribute their privately held records to the database, allowing families to share their ancestor’s World War I history.

To further promote Missouri’s World War I history, partners and staff attended and presented at many regional, state, and national history conferences to share the project with the scholarly community. Staff developed lesson plans targeting middle and high school-aged students using the digitized documents. Staff also offered workshops to teachers on how to incorporate these lesson plans and collections in the classroom.

For more information, contact Brian Grubbs at 417-616-0544, or briang@thelibrary.org.


PRESS CONTACTS

Vickie Hicks
Community Relations Director
vickieh@thelibrary.org
(417) 616-0564
Morgan Shannon
Copywriter
morgans@thelibrary.org
(417) 616-0566

Find this article at http://thelibrary.org/press/article.cfm?aid=4373


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