Special Projects: Preservation Week 2020

April 27-May 1 is Preservation Week

Preservation Week is sponsored by the American Library Association to highlight the importance of preserving collections and archives, in libraries, museums, and other institutions, and we are highlighting preservation and collections efforts by JAHA and the Cambria County Library!

This year, the theme of Preservation Week is Oral History Interviews. This is a timely topic, not only because of the continued and growing use of oral history by museums, libraries, and schools, but also that, with the coronavirus placing people in quarantine, oral history interviews can still be conducted on many different topics to create content and share history.

Here are some links on this site and elsewhere that are relevant to Preservation Week.

Digitization Projects

The Digitization, Curation, and Dissemination of JAHA’s 1889 Flood Photographs: This recent project with UPJ and Historic Pittsburgh is making more of our 1889 flood photography available to the public. Here’s a recent blog post about the effort, including a link to the first collection.

Details on the project

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PA Photos and Documents: The Cambria County Library participates in a statewide initiative called PA Photos and Documents. The project is a digitization service funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania that allows local libraries to scan and preserve photos, ephemera, pamphlets, books and more, and enables the storage and retrieval of those collections by hosting their digital images on their website.

Visit PA photos and documents

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Oral Histories

Jewish Oral Histories: Located on this site, these oral histories preserve some of the rich history of Johnstown’s Jewish community.

Jewish oral histories

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1977 Flood Oral Histories: In 2016 and 2017, Conrad Suppes, a member of Boy Scout Troop Johnstown 2183, completed his Eagle Scout project by recording oral histories of survivors of the Johnstown Flood of 1977.

1977 Flood oral histories