Mike Legeros. Photo credit: News and Observer
This year marks the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center’s 10th anniversary, and to celebrate we’ll be posting 10 stories from 10 stakeholders about how NCDHC has impacted their organizations.
Today’s 10 for 10 post is from Mike Legeros, historian and president of Raleigh’s Fire Museum (Museum home page | NCDHC contributor page). You can find a lot of research and additional documents at Mike’s history page as well. Since 2018, we’ve partnered with the Museum to digitize scrapbooks and history books. Read below for more about our partnership with the Fire History Museum.
What impact has NCDHC had on your institution and/or on a particular audience that means a lot to you?
The NC Digital Heritage Center has been instrumental is helping the Raleigh Fire Museum add digital content to our archives and web site. And, in this era of COVID, they’re valuable additions to our virtual museum experience (e.g., web site), as our physical facility has remained closed. They digitized several scrapbooks of the Raleigh Fire Department’s Ladies Auxiliary, which operated from the 1950s to the 1970s. The scrapbooks offer an intimate and personal view of the department’s activities and members as well as their spouses. The NCDHC also digitized a pair of RFD history books, from 1984 and 2002, another fabulous addition. At a higher level, they’ve helped our staff think ahead to other future digital projects, and ways that we can help other fire museums and similar organizations preserve and present their history.
