The Sedona Heritage Museum will be able to speed up the process of digitizing Sedona’s history following the purchase of a ScanPro 2500 microfilm and microfiche scanner, which will allow residents to view microfilmed documents on a computer and transfer the information to a flash drive free of charge.
“We are so grateful to our donors for contributing to our annual campaign,” SHM Executive Director Nate Meyers said. “It will allow us to digitize microfilm and microfiche. We can scan the microfilm of the Red Rock News and continue to make that more years available through the Arizona Memory Project.”
The purchase was part of a $30,000 fundraising campaign that also included SHM’s addition of the Agents of Discovery smartphone app in March, which allows visitors to complete tasks and earn prizes as part of touring the museum, as well as virtual maps with videos and multimedia.
In addition to these purchases, Meyers said that the funds raised by the campaign will support the administration of multimedia programs for the next five years and that the scanner should pay for itself within the next five years, as the museum will no longer have to outsource scanning to a facility in Maryland.
“We’d love to share this tool with other museums and residents,” Meyers said. “If you’ve got microfiche or film you need to view … we can help. I’ve had people call and say, ‘Hey, I’m a veteran, and when I left the service, they gave me my records on microfiche, but I have no way to access them.’ Well, now they do.”
Meyers pointed to a box of microfilm in the SHM collections labeled “Real estate records.”
“What those records entail I do not know, but we now got a machine that we can look at it with,” Meyers said. “If you’re interested in volunteering to help run the equipment, we’ll train you how to do it. You don’t have to come knowing how this beast works, but pretty intuitive how the whole thing works.”
Residents with microfilm to view can call the museum at (928) 282-7038 or fill out a research request at sedonamuseum.org. Those interested in volunteering for the project should ask for volunteer coordinator Julie Holst.
