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Using technology to preserve the past By Kate Carter Walking into the Saratoga History Museum is like playing a game of "What's wrong with this picture?" The small 1860s building has all the exhibit cases and framed prints that one would expect of a one-room display area depicting Saratoga's yesteryear. But one's attention is drawn to a corner of the room where a powerful computer hums away and a man sits busy behind it. That computer and the high-tech digital database and archive it houses is what Don Armstrong, a museum volunteer, hopes will make the museum's extensive collection of Saratoga memorabilia accessible to today's residents. "The database is making it possible for everyone to access the materials," Armstrong says. "The other reason for having this is we have a record of items if they get lost. I think we're preserving it for future generations." To accommodate the museum's new computer archive and encourage more public use of its collection—the pieces of which are now mostly stuffed into a small, fireproof storage room—the Saratoga Historical Foundation is building a new room onto the museum with $33,000 of county money. The room, designed by noteworthy Saratoga architect Warren Heid, should be completed this fall, according to museum curator April Halberstadt. These efforts are all intended to help more Saratogans—especially those new to the community—understand and appreciate their city's unique history. "If somebody says a particular city name, you get an impression," Halberstadt says. "We have a history. You need to preserve that if you want to preserve an identity." The Saratoga Historical Foundation has been trying to do that since it was incorporated in 1962 at the lead of former Saratoga resident Florence Cunningham. Cunningham was a member of a family that arrived in Saratoga in 1872, and subsequently became influential in the village. "The development of Saratoga is kind of tied up with the development of this family," Halberstadt says. Florence Cunningham collected all sorts of things from Saratoga's early days, including items that could be construed as trash. All that ended up in the History Museum, which opened its doors in 1976. Halberstadt says the museum's volunteer docents did their best to properly record, store and display Cunningham's collection, as well as many other items that came in over the years. But two years ago, when they received another large bequest of items from Cunningham after her death, the foundation decided it needed to hire a professional. Halberstadt now works one day a week as the museum's paid curator, along with about 15 unpaid docents. Her goals are to get the museum's collection organized according to modern museum archiving standards, seek out items that reflect Saratoga's history—especially those dating from the past 30 years, and do more to involve the community. But first, she says, the museum needs to get the new room in which it can display scrapbooks and other materials. "We haven't had any room," Halberstadt says. "We have not really done any outreach and let scholars know what we have simply because the materials are not easily accessible." Even before Halberstadt arrived on the scene, however, Armstrong was working to get the museum's collection archived on a digital database he has been designing himself for the past four years. A retired computer engineer, Armstrong built his database using Microsoft Access software. Almaden's Quicksilver Mining Museum is now using the database, and other museums in the area have expressed an interest in it, Halberstadt says. "For the first time in history, software and hardware is cheap enough that a small museum can actually have things on a computer," she says. "That wasn't possible five years ago." Armstrong has designed his database to be capable of archiving every one of the museum's 25,000 items. The program includes a search function that allows individuals curious about a particular individual, family, neighborhood, building type and so on to search for every archived item in the collection related to that query. He has also digitally scanned historic photographs and newspaper articles to be saved for posterity on the computer—the search engine also searches all the words in the newspaper articles and returns results from those, as well. Digital audio and video recordings will also be available from the archive. He plans to photograph all the museum's three-dimensional items to be recorded on the computer, and some photographs will be accompanied by audio commentary from city historians. The computer archive makes it easier for the volunteer staff to respond to requests from researchers by merely typing a query into the database and referring to what comes up, Halberstadt says. Some of the museum's collections of more national interest, such as its documents about the family of slavery abolitionist John Brown, which settled in Saratoga in the 1800s, are also intended to be made available on the Internet. "Don's work is absolutely, incredibly important," Halberstadt says. "It's absolutely leading-edge." And, Armstrong says, the new computer program is making it easier for the museum to increase its collection. When individuals come in for copies of old photos, which he can quickly print off the computer for a nominal fee, they sometimes come back with their own lovingly prepared and kept family scrapbooks, offering those to Armstrong for recording digitally in the computer. The task is daunting—Armstrong so far has only archived 10 percent of the museum's holdings, and the job only grows as more items come in. But with the new room, there will be more space to set up additional computers and get more people helping with the data input. "I think it's important to the community because we need to get the message out about our historical roots," Armstrong says. "We've got a lot of interesting buildings on Big Basin Way, and these all have stories behind them. There's a lot of pressure out there to tear it down and throw it away. What we have here is unique, and we should capitalize on that and value our heritage." The Saratoga History Museum, 20450 Saratoga-Los Gatos Road, is open Friday through Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m. For more information, call 408.867.4311. |
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