The Archive Project

Brought to you by the Appomattox Regional Governor's School for the Arts and Technology

The Archive Project is part of a teacher led, student driven, public history class (Historical Depths) where students learn about archive management, object analysis, oral history, propaganda, and archaeology.

The school and all archive material is located at the old Petersburg High School building in Petersburg, VA.

The mission of The Oral History Project is to gather the personal histories of individuals from all walks of life in order to preserve their contributions to the larger picture. The Oral History Project archives oral and/or video histories at ARGS and they are available to scholars and researchers. Students interview seniors, digitize any photos, and transcribe the interviews. A digital ‘package’ is created for the interviewee and our archive which is available online.

The PHS Archive is a collection of nearly a thousand ephemeral and other items from the old Petersburg High School (1918-1973). Rehabilitated in 1999, and placed on the historic registry, the Appomattox Regional Governor's School is currently located there. Photos and descriptions of the individual pieces are available online for the public or you can make an appointment for an in-person visit. The archive has a photo for every piece, and we are beginning to scan multi-page items. Some of the yearbooks currently have library links for individual pages but our goal is to scan the unique pages of our copies.

The Ephemera Archive at ARGS is a new facet of the archives we maintain. Through acquisitions and donations, we have nearly one thousand newspapers and hundreds of magazines in storage. Unfortunately many are too fragile for people to handle them directly so we are working on scanning them. These newspapers date from the 1800’s through the Cold War era from multiple countries and most of them do not exist in a digital format. Microfiche and photo rolls do preserve but they generally aren’t available as a searchable database.

The Archive Project's contents are available without charge to all for research, scholarship, and private study under the "Fair Use" provision of U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code).

Funded in part by the Virginia Museum of History & Culture's Commonwealth History Fund.

Made possible by a generous grant from Dominion Energy.

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