Please join us for a discussion of Historic Huguenot Street’s (HHS) three-year project (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities) to preserve and digitize significant historical documents from its own archival collections, as well as materials from project partners the Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection at Elting Memorial Library, the Reformed Church of New Paltz, and the Town of New Paltz.
This project encompasses documents ranging from the mid-1600s to about 1830, and it has allowed the partners (with the help of professional conservators and a digital imaging vendor) to conserve, digitize, and make available online at NYHeritage.org nearly 20,000 pages of documents thus far. These documents, which include legal, financial, and religious records, as well as a wealth of personal letters, provide detailed insight into the lives of New Paltz residents. To complement this project, in 2022 HHS commissioned translations of Dutch documents by Dr. Jaap Jacobs and Julie van den Hout, supported as part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York. These translations are available online with the digitized documents and include many items that had not been previously translated.
Beth Patkus, HHS Archivist/Librarian, will give an overview of HHS, its archives and library, and the resources it has to offer. Donna Dixon, Digital Librarian/Project Manager at HHS, will discuss the NEH project and demonstrate how to navigate and search the New Paltz Historic Documents online collection, including documents that have been recently translated.
About Our Presenters
Donna Dixon is Digital Librarian/Project Manager at Historic Huguenot Street (HHS), where she is responsible for the cataloging and workflow management of the New Paltz Historic Documents project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She fell in love with archives and original cataloging during a library school internship at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in 2000, so her role at HHS is the job she always secretly wanted. Donna previously held sales and leadership roles in a statewide library consortium and in scholarly publishing, where she presented workshops on virtual reference, collection analysis, and open access publishing, as well as digitization of special collections. She is also a public reference librarian and freelance editor. She holds an MLS from the University at Albany and a BA in English from Siena College.
Beth Patkus is Archivist/Librarian at Historic Huguenot Street, where she manages the library and archival collections and handles research requests. Beth came to HHS in late 2022 with 30 years’ experience in archive management. She began her career as a processing archivist, then took a turn into the fascinating world of preservation and conservation education, before returning to hands-on archival work. She spent more than 15 years affiliated with Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Massachusetts, first as an employee and later as a consultant, conducting preservation surveys, creating educational materials, and presenting workshops for libraries, archives, and historical societies in the New England and New York areas. Beth holds an MILS from the University of Michigan and a BA from Wellesley College.