Rotary donates acid-free sleeves to Historical Society to preserve images

Perry County history will soon be better preserved for all to enjoy.
The Rotary Club of Perryville was awarded a matching CAP grant from Rotary District 6060 to purchase acid free sleeves for Perry County Historical Society to better preserve the photographs and other clippings that are stored at the Perry County Museum in the city park.
Becky Paulus of the Rotary of Perryville noted that the project is near and dear to members of the local Rotary. In all the grant totaled $1,200 to help purchase the equipment.
“Michael Bullerdieck is a member of the historical society, and he was speaking to them about any projects that they needed help with,” Paulus said. “It is a great honor to help preserve the large collection of photos that has been acquired by the society over the years. It should help with the public viewing of those pictures and articles and research that is done for hundreds of years to come.”
Perry County Historical Society Director Bill Hart was excited about the acid-free sleeves.
“We are grateful for the Rotary’s donation,” Hart said. “It has been something that we have wanted to do for a long time and has been a priority of mine since I got here about one year ago. Preserving pictorial images is a way of preserving our history. These sleeves should help with that because some of them are taped to cardboard and other surfaces which hurts the images.”
Hart noted there are approximately 7,600 items currently stored in the museum that will need to be transferred to the acid free sleeves.

“A lot of them are pictures of places around the county and pictures of people and their family members,” Hart said. “They document businesses, farms, and homes. We have anything that is essential to the history of Perry County going into these sleeves.”
Along with putting each item into a sleeve, Hart will also be scanning each picture and clipping into a program as well to digitize the item.
“We will have an inventory of each item, that should help us find the items that people ask for quicker and help us preserve original copy as well, because there won’t be too many people handling them,” Hart said.
Hart is also looking for other funding for pictures that were acquired from the Republic-Monitor several months ago.
“Those pictures require a different grant and source of funding because those pictures are mostly negatives, which require a different type of scanning system,” Hart said. For now, we are focused on the images in the Perry County Museum.”
Hart is ready to tackle the long project ahead and he should have some help as part of the grant process is to help install the equipment purchased with the grant, in this case transferring photos to the sleeves themselves.
“If it was just scanning them in, it wouldn’t take that long,” Hart said. “But we have to carefully take the images out of the material they are stored in, carefully scan them, and put them in the new media. We haven’t done that. This is our first project on this scale.”