The Hagley Library
 
The Hagley Library, which is currently exhibiting a digital collection on its website, has been granted funds for its project, "Industrial Brandywine History." Hagley is putting together the first comprehensive, web-based historical overview of industrialization along the Brandywine River from the mid-1700s to the end of the 20th Century by accessing out-of-print and unpublished sources, dissertations and theses, and as-yet-unused resources at Hagley and elsewhere. The end product will be a freely available, online database of all known businesses along the river from the 18th to 20th Centuries, as well as maps and graphs. This project will serve as a teaching tool, provide a building block for future scholarship, and offer a reexamination of the region as it relates to larger issues related to business and industry in the United States. Users will likely include scholars and history buffs seeking insight into the commercial development of the region, which is an important part of local history and heritage.
 
For more information: www.hagley.org

Lewes Historical Society
 
The Lewes Historical Society has been granted funds for its project, "Digitizing Records of the Lewes Maritime Industries." LHS is digitizing and making accessible online the records of industries that provided livelihoods for hundreds of people in the Cape Henlopen region and played an important role in our nation's development. Lewes's once thriving shipbuilding industry dates back to at least 1683, and LHS is fortunate to have written records, personal diaries and photographs from employers and employees in maritime industries that were (and, in some cases, still are) located at the mouth of the Delaware Bay. Some of the targeted materials for digitization tell the stories of: Cato Lewis, who learned the shipbuilding trade as a slave and went on to found one of the first African-American-owned shipyards; Otis Smith's Fish Products Company, a menhaden fishery that maintained facilities from Canada to South America and operated in Lewes until 1966 (menhaden is a fish used for fishmeal and fed to poultry, farmed salmon, etc.); the Life-Saving Station Service (forerunner of the Coast Guard), which rescued hundreds of mariners during the blizzard of 1888; and the Pilots' Association for the Bay & River Delaware (founded in 1896 in Lewes), which guided ships upriver to Wilmington, Philadelphia and Trenton.
 
For more information: www.historiclewes.org

Delaware Agricultural Museum and Village
 
Farming defines rural life and culture, and as food producers, farmers are forever connected to all of us as consumers. Beginning with the first settlers, agriculture has played an integral part in Delaware's history, from the cottage industries and small farms that dominated in the past to the giant, integrated agricultural industries that rule today. A dramatic loss of open land to development and urbanization has led to significant transitions in the farming industry, with farmers adapting to changes in markets, availability of resources and consumer needs. The Delaware Agricultural Museum and Village's "Your Food, Our Farms: Transitions in Delaware's Diverse Agricultural Industry" project will explore the cycle of change in the dynamic and ever-responsive agribusiness world, including giant farming industries (i.e., poultry), as well as the return to the small farms of the past in the form of U-picks, Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs) and small-scale cattle producers. "Your Food, Our Farms" will illustrate the history and current significance of farming through an exhibit, website, and educational materials, and will preserve and relate this essential Delaware story with a digital archive.
 
For more information: www.agriculturalmuseum.org

Berkana Center for Media and Education, Inc.
 
Berkana Center for Media and Education will record and archive (at the Delaware Public Archives) the oral history, as told by Governor Russell Peterson, of the passage of Delaware's 1981 Coastal Zone Act, which stopped the industrial development of Delaware's coast. Despite multiple attempts to weaken it through the years, it remains one of the strongest pieces of state-based environmental legislation in the United States, and, according to Carol Hoffecker, Professor Emeritus of History at UD, "remains Delaware's greatest and most comprehensive legislative achievement towards maintaining a livable environment." Governor Russell Peterson, then a Republican and former DuPont research chemist (who has never been interviewed on video about this topic), recognized the future significance of industrial development not only to Delaware's coastline, but to the quality of life for future Delawareans, and took a stand against the clandestine plans of Shell Oil to build a heavy oil refining port in southern New Castle County that threatened to destroy open spaces. Recognizing the conflicting values of industrial development and natural habitat preservation, Peterson and a small group of committed legislators bucked the corporate legacy of Delaware and effectively pitted local landowners against area businessmen and union workers against management. Their revolutionary efforts "forced" Delawareans to address the environmental movement directly.

Milford Commission on Landmarks and Museums
 
The Milford Museum will digitize more than 1,000 images and develop a searchable electronic archive of its entire collection. The Museum will establish an on-site computer station to allow the public to conduct personal research within the collection and plans to use the archive as a starting point for a Milford Museum website (projected for 2011) and a link to the Delaware Public Archives. The Milford Museum has a considerable collection of historic photos and images of Milford and the surrounding area, but limited ability to display them publicly, despite evidence of public interest. Recent exhibits of the Museum's collection--The History of Baseball in Milford and Rock and Roll in Milford--were well-received by the community, yet only a small portion of the Museum's total relevant collection could be displayed. This electronic archive will increase the accessibility of the Museum's collection.

UD Center for Historical Architecture and Design, Museum Studies Program and Research & Data Management Services
 
CHAD, the Museum Studies Program and Research & Data Management Services at UD will use approximately 3,000 images owned by the Laurel Historical Society to create the "Visual Catalog of the Waller Collection," a digital exhibit and research database. The collection provides an unprecedented glimpse of rural industry, architecture and material culture of everyday life from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries; converting it to a digital format will make it accessible to scholars and students around the world. In addition to creating the digital database, they will re-house the negatives and prints in formats that will preserve the media and construct a platform for a visual data catalog that can be used on future projects. The Waller Photographic Collection is comprised of approximately 5,000 photographic negatives, which date from 1897 through the mid-20th Century, from the collective body of work of the father-son photographic team in southwestern Sussex County.
 
For more information: www.udel.edu/CHAD; www.udel.edu/museumstudies; http://maps.rdms.udel.edu/gis/rdms.php