Haddonfield Public Library
Haddonfield Public Library showed us the importance of making historical resources readily available to the community.
Haddonfield Public Library showed us the importance of making historical resources readily available to the community. The vault of their library, formerly a 1920s bank, houses a local history collection with all sorts of old documents: scrapbooks, meeting minutes, and more. One day, when poking around in the collections, Andrea Elson stumbled upon a brown sandwich bag containing letters from the late eighteenth century.
These letters had been lying in the vault for years, unbeknownst to any members of the staff. According to Elson and Cathy DeCampli, “The discovery and realization that the library had all of these resources fueled our participation in the Community History project.”
They looked for ways to make their collections more accessible to the community and began promoting the library as a central spot for community history engagement in their Borough, offering greater access to scanned historical documents and purchasing a digital kiosk to allow community members to present their stories through interactive maps and virtual exhibits.