Digitizing NH Town Reports

Part of NHSL's Town Report Collection

One of the ARPA-funded projects the NHSL is working on is to provide a permanent digital collection, accessible on the web, to town reports for all 234 New Hampshire Towns. We are doing this in partnership with UNH.

UNH’s collection includes 15,700 digitized reports from 214 of the 234 towns in New Hampshire. It is hosted as part of their scholars archive at https://scholars.unh.edu/nh_town_reports. Since December 2020 documents in this online collection have been downloaded over 25,000 times by users from 136 countries around the world. They have a process in place and a contract with a company that digitizes the reports for them. It is a great resource!

The NHSL has a paper collection of NH Town Reports, some dating as far back as the mid-1800s. We obtain these reports each year directly from the Town clerks per RSA 201-A:18, paragraph (d): “The clerk in each town and city shall forward to the state library 2 copies each, and to the library of the University of New Hampshire one copy each, of the city or town report for the previous fiscal year.”  http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/rsa/html/XVI/201-A/201-A-18.htm

The project we are are undertaking is to fund UNH to fill in the existing gaps in their digital town report collection. We will also be working with them to locate paper copies of reports needing to be digitized. The project will be worked on throughout the coming year (up until the ARPA grant funding deadline) and will include loading existing born-digital reports to the site and digitizing from paper those reports that are missing from the digital collection. NHSL staff and UNH staff are working on inventorying existing physical holdings so we will know if we have gaps. If we do, we will do outreach to specific towns to fill those gaps.

The NHSL catalog includes a serial record for each NH town report. We have added a link to each of these bibliographic records (with a few exceptions which I will address next) that takes you to the UNH page for that specific town. The paper holdings of NHSL are reflected as individual items on the serial records in our catalog. When we began working on this in May we realized that lots of our paper holdings were not reflected in the online catalog. Since that time NHSL staff has added 8,504 town report items to the catalog and continues to work on this (about 2,000 town report items are being added each month).

The towns that do not have links in their report records to the UNH site are the ones for which there are no digital holdings in the UNH collection. These will be the first priority in the digitizing project:  Middleton, Mont Vernon, Orange, Pittsburg, Sugar Hill, Sullivan, Surry, Waterville Valley, Webster, Wentworth, Westmoreland, Whitefield, Wilmot, Winchester, Windham, Windsor, Wolfeboro, and Woodstock. The full NHSL holdings for these town reports are reflected in our catalog.

If you would like to replace the MARC record in your local system with the one to which we have added the live link (as an 856 tag) to the digital collection, you can do so by saving the MARC record from the NHSL catalog:

1. Search the catalog for the town report you want (a keyword search for REPORT and the name of the town typically gets you there)
2. At the right side of the screen is a "Save record" option. Click that and choose the format your local system uses (MARC UTF-8 is common) and save the bib record.
   
3. Load the saved record into your local system so that it will overlay your existing record and keep your items intact. (How to do this is different in every system).