An ever-increasing amount of Falls Church history is now available with just a few keystrokes.
The city’s Mary Riley Styles Public Library has started encouraging the public to take a test drive of its new digital archive.
Though the library held a soft launch for the archive a year ago, “we wanted to build the collection” before formally unveiling it, said Marshall Webster, the adult-services supervisor for the library.
Webster was speaking during a Dec. 13 tutorial that drew local residents interested in getting the most out of the new system.
“Amazing,” “wow” and “very impressive” were some of the feedback received at the Dec. 13 event.
A similar training session had been held Dec. 10. Each ran about 75 minutes.
To date, the online collection has about 26,000 distinct “assets” totaling about 70,000 pages of information. Holdings include about 8,000 digitized photographs.
City documents, community newsletters, school publications and obituaries/death notices are among the items made available to the public. Nearly all are fully searchable.
Funding to support the initiative has been provided by the Mary Riley Styles Public Library Foundation. One does not need to hold a library card to access archived materials.
Webster said that, at present, the library has used only 7% of the storage space it has available. Staff are moving methodically to build the collection, he said.
“We want to keep putting it up, putting it up. Our goal is to do everything, but it takes time,” Webster said. “We’ve been going with more of the marquee things.”
Library staff also are experimenting with the use of artificial intelligence, albeit “very slowly,” Webster said. One use will be to have an AI service read through letters written by soldiers during the Civil War and create a summary to aid researchers.
The effort also has digitized minutes of the Falls Church City Council going back to its founding in the late 1940s. Future efforts will focus on digitizing records during the time Falls Church was a town, dating back to the 1870s.
The site also has links to external research sources, including the yearbooks of Jefferson and George Mason (now Meridian) high schools and the Library of Virginia’s archives of Falls Church newspapers.
The digital archive is designed to complement the Falls Church History Room, located at the library and open Mondays and Wednesdays and select weekends.
The library system accepts donations of historical material connected to the city.
