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Date: 2/18/2021
LONGMEADOW – The Richard Salter Storrs Library in Longmeadow has received grants to fund two different kinds of preservation.
Adult Services Director Heather Marchetta explained that the Preservation Assessment Grant is going to help the library determine its preservation priorities.
“This particular grant is going to help us figure out which items we have of truly historical value,” Marchetta told Reminder Publishing. “Once we have this assessment in place, we will begin researching the process of digitizing our historical and genealogical collections, preserving first the items most at risk of deterioration,” she said in a statement.
The second part of that grant will address the way the design of the library can be used to better preserve those historical documents and artifacts.
“I think would like to address some space issues and create some more space upstairs that is more usable and inviting,” Marchetta said. Currently, a room upstairs houses the historical items in the library’s collection, but the space can be better utilized, she added.
The second grant, funded through federal coronavirus relief funding, is for Virtual Programming for Distance Learning. With this grant, the library is partnering with the Longmeadow Historical Society to create “Hidden Voices of History,” a series of programs “to highlight lost or underrepresented voices and their valuable stories,” said Adult Services Librarian Becky Vitkauskas in the statement.
Marchetta explained that the recorded programs, running from an hour to an hour and a half, will feature local speakers from the American School For the Deaf, the Longmeadow Cemetery Association and a University of Massachusetts Amherst history professor who specializes in race, slavery and emancipation, among others. From the early treatment of the disabled and mentally ill to interactions between Europeans and indigenous or enslaved people of color, each expert will tell, in Vitkouskas’s words, “important stories that the dominant record has neglected.”
The twice-monthly series will run from March through September.