by Bailey White
Staff Writer
There are more than 3,000 postcards in the Jacksonville Public Library’s collection, offering a glimpse into Jacksonville’s past and Florida’s history: the oldest ones date to the earliest days of the 1900s.
One postcard shows a man riding a cart being pulled by an ostrich at one of the City’s old ostrich farms. Another, postmarked Jan. 23, 1923, shows the New Palace Theatre on the front and a handwritten note on the back.
Now all of the postcards, front and back, can be viewed online, with a quick search of the library’s JaxCat search page. The online versions even include a transcription of the postcard’s message.
The newly digitized images are just one part of the library’s ongoing project to make its collection of antique and rare materials more accessible to the public.
“It’s also a way of preserving the materials,” said Jim Beaven, project coordinator for the digital library collection. “This way more people get to use the materials, but there is less handling of them, so they’ll last longer.”
The process of digitizing the collection also includes making digital images of historic photographs, antique books and a group of old city directories, the earliest from 1870.
“In some cases,” said Beaven, “we do a full capture of the rare books, so the entire book can be viewed.”
The process involves making digital photographs of each page of the book and is extremely time consuming — one edition can take an entire month. But it will allow a person to view the book page by page
“We’ll also have some materials available only as raw information,” said Raymond Neal, a project librarian for the Digital Library Collection. “The city directories, for instance, will appear as text-only files.”
A collection of photographs will also soon be available online. Like the postcards, the photographs show Jacksonville and Florida in their younger years.
“There are about four or five hundred of these,” said Neal. “We hope to have them up by the end of the year.”
The group has even started a Bible records project to capture historic information recorded by families over the years. They’ve started with a Bible belonging to the Hart (as in Isaiah D. Hart Bridge) family.
“We’re asking people to bring us their 1900 or older Bibles to be scanned,” said Beaven.
The Bibles will be returned, and the pages stored online, complete with transcriptions of the names.
To view the postcards, go to http://jpl.coj.net/DLC/Florida/postcards.html.