Founded in 1921 with a gift by John T. Loomis, who was a historian and dedicated collector of Adirondackana, the Archives has expanded to include much material from the Adirondack Bibliography, authored by Dorothy Plum of Keene. In addition, since 1987, the Archives has housed the records of the Adirondack Mountain Reserve. Containing a large collection of photographs and local historical and genealogical materials, the Archives is open each Tuesday and Thursday morning for research and study.​

 

ANNUAL REPORT

Keene Valley Library Archives

August 28, 2023

It’s been a productive and busy year in the Archives.  Tony Goodwin (Town Historian) has been working here with us and is organizing the contents of the Keene Library Archives, housed here during the construction project at the Keene Library.   We have scanned images from and are housing much of this collection.  The Keene collection includes a large number of photographs of and comments on many of the Town roads and houses.  We have placed the contents of these notebooks in archival-quality sleeves.  These are a popular resource; we have had great interest in histories of various properties in the Town of Keene as visitors have emailed or stopped in to explore the stories of their homes.   In sharing the contents of the Keene Archives we have been able to provide improved access and a good storage environment for the contents.

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I have been working with a vendor-purchased platform to load our vast collection of images online.  This is an important project and provides remote access to our images.  Since we have around 7000 scanned images, this is an ongoing and long-term project.  Margaret has begun entering descriptive data of our manuscript collection using this platform as well.

Margaret continues her work with the oral history project “Adirondack Community,” compiling transcripts of recorded stories.

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We continue to provide information and images in answer to queries we receive from visitors and through correspondence. 

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We were pleased to receive a visit from Bob Bayle, author of An Adirondack portfolio, 1902-1935: the hiking stories and photographs of Francis Bayle, which provides a record of his father’s extensive hiking and includes many photographs of our area.  In addition to gifting us with a copy of the book, Bayle provided us with scans of several views, new to our collection, of nearby peaks.

 

                                                                                                Elizabeth Rogers        

                                                                                                Margaret Hawthorn