PRESERVING HISTORY
Local records of flood control, race relations and education to be microfilmed

Deep within the stacks of Hill Memorial Library, which is home to the LSU Libraries Special Collections Division, rests more than 700,000 boxed-up pages of Louisiana's history on the brink of deterioration. One hundred and thirty years of parish-level records dating from 1811 to 1940 are waiting to be saved.

Thanks to a team of library staff members and a 30-month, $196,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the records will be preserved for study by humanists and social scientists for many years to come.

"In their deteriorated state, every use of these documents is damaging," says Tara Laver, assistant curator for manuscripts at Hill Memorial Library and principal investigator of the NHPRC grant. "Microfilming of the transcriptions is essential to preserve the important historical information in these records."

From 1939 to 1942, as part of President Roosevelt's New Deal program, the Louisiana Historical Records Survey hired many citizens to make transcriptions of the original minutes of Louisiana's 64 parish policy juries, the governing body of each parish. Once complete, those records were stored at LSU. The transcriptions were made on poor quality, wood-pulp paper, which became severely embrittled over time making every use of the records more damaging than the last.

Historically, Louisiana's governmental structure gives a significant amount of power to the parish level of government. The records shed light on the evolution of government responsibility, settlement of the state's rural areas and changes in land ownership, slavery and changes in the status of African Americans after emancipation, as well as flood control and levee building, yellow fever outbreaks, and the development of education for both whites and blacks. Genealogists also find the transcriptions useful in identifying ancestors' places of residence, death dates, and roles in their communities.

For the duration of the preservation project, the staff will go through every record in each box, catalog the record, and make a microfilm copy of the record. To better serve researchers, Laver and her colleagues are developing an improved electronic catalog and search aid for the police jury records. Before being sent off to the Louisiana State Archives in Baton Rouge for environment-regulated storage, information on each record, such as parish and time of meeting, will be entered into a database to allow for better searchability. The records will remain a permanent fixture in the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, one of the largest of the over 5,000 manuscript collections in Hill Memorial Library. The entirety of the library's collections includes troves of rare books, personal papers, journals, photos, and drawings.

Once the records are on microfilm, they will be available at LSU for national and international interlibrary loan and for purchase by the public, assuring they will be preserved for examination by generations of researchers and citizens.

ON THE WEB:
LSU Libraries Special Collections Division
National Historical Publications and Records Commission

from Spring 2005