SENECA FALLS — A large collection of local history scrapbooks compiled by late Seneca Falls Town Historian Roberta Halden has been digitized by the Seneca Falls Library — and they’re now available online.

Library Director Jenny Burnett said since arriving at the library in 2018, she has been considering which areas of the library’s collection are ripe for digitization. The collection of 129 scrapbooks was at the top of her list.

“I said (this collection) is irreplaceable and the library board agreed to do it,” she said, noting the project was fully funded by the library.

The notebooks contain newspaper clippings, photographs and other local ephemera dating from the 1860s to 2017. The library also is digitizing six other historical items in its collection, including a group of Daughters of the American Revolution letters, a St. Patrick’s Church booklet, programs from the popular Aqua Festival, and several visitor guides from different eras.

Like so many other things, the project was waylaid by the Covid pandemic. Scanning of the collection got under way in May and was completed in mid-August, Burnett said. Ninety of the 129 scrapbooks are available online; the remaining still have to be run through optimal character recognition software so they are more searchable.

Burnett said the Southern Regional Library Council was hired to perform…