Town Report Project Update

The final batch of NH town
reports ready for pickup

Back in September we began an ARPA-funded project, in partnership with UNH, to provide a permanent digital collection, accessible on the web, to town reports for all 234 New Hampshire Towns. 

That project has been a focus for the NHAIS & Technical Services section here at the State Library, as well as the Circulation staff. This week UNH staff (who have also been doing a TON of work on this project) will pick up the last batch of reports from the NHSL collections to be digitized. Over the last several months we have pulled 11,363 individual town reports from NHSL shelves and sent them to UNH for digitizing, creation of metadata, and addition to their digital archive. 

When we began this project we discovered that most of the NH Town Reports in our collection did not have item-level cataloging in our system.  There were 9,704 individual town reports in the NHSL catalog back in September. There are now 39,023 items in our catalog for 243 towns. This includes the 234 official NH towns as well as some villages and "locations" that have issued town reports in the past. In cases where a town had one name and changed to a different one, those reports (if we have them) are reflected on the record for the current name of the town.

There are currently 21 NH towns "completed" (meaning all the reports UNH and NHSL have for that town are digitized and available online. As UNH processes the reports more and more towns will be fully available online. We appreciate the libraries who told us about their town report holdings and we will be sharing that info with UNH after all our holdings are completed so that any remaining gaps might be filled in.