Explore Digital Worcester

Digital Worcester emerged from a partnership between the Worcester Historical Museum and the Humanities and Arts Department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The project now includes the Worcester Public Library as a collaborator in bringing rare historical materials to a broader audience through digitization and web-accessibility.

Digital Worcester’s stated mission is two-fold: 1) to use digital technologies to make internet-accessible historical materials that illuminate Worcester’s rich past; and, 2) to develop compelling crowdsourcing applications to engage both local and national audiences in interpreting and analyzing big historical data relating to Worcester’s urban industrial growth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

To achieve its mission, Digital Worcester states that it will:

  • Digitize historical materials on the city’s urban and industrial history
  • Maintain an accessible online collection of digitized materials
  • Educate the public through both public demonstrations and online tutorials of digital history tools and search engines
  • Engage in local community outreach to provide for the digital preservation of materials in both public and private collections
  • Develop means to engage the public in interpreting, transcribing, and coding sources for spatial and geographic interpretation
  • Host of forum for local historians, genealogists and academic scholars to share their work in the collections of DW

To explore Digital Worcester, click here