Undertaking a lodge archival program

I'm curious if any of the lodges the brothers here belong to have taken on the task of digitizing their records. If so, what approach and/or software did you use? Did you digitize every scrap of paper you could find or just certain categories?

What a great idea - I encourage you in this endevour !

For about a decade, our lodge minutes have been in electronic form and sent to members. Appearance book, declaration book and clearance book are all in hard copy only. That said, we have documented a lot of our early records by photographing them.. it is not perfect but better than nothing..

To share, they are on the web (but newer records sit with the Sec only). ( http://www.lodgedevotion.net/about-devotion/lodge-devotion-foundation-timeline )

Further, we are building a budget for a professional to come in and document our masonic centre - especially photos.. there are many historic ones we would like to share..

Membership records themselves are held by GL - old ones on microfiche which is now digitized into PDF (images not text, which is a big short coming) but recent ones sit in a Salesforce database - Secs can get their own lodge records of any past and present member since the system started - staff and certain volunteers can access full records. I would ask your Lodge Sec what he can currently get from your GL.

At one time one of the Arkansas universities undertook this task. They had a large grant and were trying to preserve all of Arkansas history. I sent many-many records to them at one time. Never heard what happened.

Rifleman1776 said:

At one time one of the Arkansas universities undertook this task. They had a large grant and were trying to preserve all of Arkansas history. I sent many-many records to them at one time. Never heard what happened.

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Interesting. I asked about something similar but was told that one of the restrictions we're under is that our records cannot leave the building and using 3rd parties is not an option. Sigh.