What are we about?
Digital Worcester (DW) emerged out of a partnership between Worcester Historical Museum and the Humanities and Arts Department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The project now includes Worcester Public Library as a collaborator in bringing rare historical materials to a broader audience through digitization and web-accessibility.
DW’s mission is two fold: (1) to use digital technologies to make internet-accessible historical materials that illuminate Worcester’s rich past and (2) to develop compelling crowdsourcing applications to engage both local and national audiences in interpreting and analyzing big historical data relating to Worcester’s urban industrial growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
To achieve its mission, DW will:
- Digitize historical materials on the city’s urban and industrial history
- Maintain an accessible online collection of digitized materials
- Educate the public through both public demonstrations and online tutorials of digital history tools and search engines
- Engage in local community outreach to provide for the digital preservation of materials in both public and private collections
- Develop means to engage the public in interpreting, transcribing, and coding sources for spatial and geographic interpretation
- Host of forum for local historians, genealogists and academic scholars to share their work in the collections of DW
