The Adirondack Museum at Blue Mountain Lake, in Hamilton County has received a grant in the amount of $4,253 from the New York Newspaper Foundation in support of microfilm services in the museum’s research library.

According to Librarian Jerry Pepper, the funds will underwrite the partial cost of preserving twelve newspapers published in the Adirondack Park over the next two years.

The Adirondack Museum has long appreciated the unique role played by local newspapers in documenting every-day life in the Adirondacks, and has collected and microfilmed regional newspapers since 1970. The collection now contains 108 different regional newspaper titles in microfilm format, some dating from the early nineteenth century.

Since 2003 the museum has collaborated with the Northern New York Library Network to increase research access to its microfilmed newspapers and make them available for use on the Internet.

The project, called the Northern New York Historical Newspapers Project, has digitized and electronically indexed 1,693,000 individual pages from forty-four newspapers in the region. The initiative has proven to be a great asset to those interested in the region’s unique history: over 12 million online searches of the site are conducted annually.

The Adirondack Museum is grateful for assistance with preparation and submission of the successful grant proposal from John Hammond, Director of the Northern New York Library Network, and Catherine Moore, Publisher of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.