It's National Library Week (from April 13 - 19) and I'd like to show some appreciation for Brattleboro's Brooks Memorial Library with the start of a special project that requires both a library card and a computer, items many of us hold near and dear to our information-seeking hearts. This will also give you practice using the online services of the library.
The project is to transcribe Mary Cabot's "Annals of Brattleboro" into the Brattleboro Community Brain Trust so it can be available to everyone as an easily searchable document. Daunting? Yes. Daring? Quite. Impossible? Not at all.
This mission, if you choose to accept it, is to volunteer to transcribe a minimum of one chapter from Volume 1 and email it to me. I'll format it and put it in the Brain Trust. Others can then volunteer to proofread and we can make changes together. In the end, we all have Brattleboro's history at our fingertips.
So that there is no duplication, please indicate which chapter(s) you'd like to do below. Here's how:
Go to the Brooks Memorial Library website and click on "Library Databases" to get to an assortment of online databases. In this case, we are looking for the Heritage Quest, about halfway down the page. This takes you to the Heritage Quest Online login page, and is where you need to enter your library card number. It wants all your numbers, and no spaces.
(What? No library card? Stop down and get one!)
Once in, you will "Search Books" and "Search Places" for "Brattleboro." The first result is Mary Cabot's book, written in 1921 (and in the public domain). If you click on "View Hits" it will give you a complete copy of the book in PDF form, ready for transcribing.
Mary Cabot, I'd imagine, would be happy to know that her book is still found interesting and useful. Indeed, it is one of the best references on Brattleboro history ever undertaken. She was very generous with sharing her stories with the editor of "with interest" shortly after her book was published, and a summary of her "Annals" was the final booklet in the series a decade later.
Again, we'll just work on Volume 1 for now. You can choose any chapter not yet taken.
Who will be first to take on such chapters as Social life, The Stage-House, Federal Galaxy, or the paper mill? I'll set up the Table of Contents and take on Chapter 1 - The Indians and Fort Dummer.
This will be a great resource when complete, and I imagine the project will take much longer than National Library Week, but it seemed like a good excuse to encourage you to get a library card and also to take advantage of what that card can do for you online. (If you are lucky enough to own a copy, you can, of course, work from that.)