Alegent Health Immanuel Medical Center

The rich and well documented history of Immanuel Medical Center in Omaha, Nebraska is shown in these images of the early buildings, people and artifacts. An archive of thousands of photos, papers and items has been maintained for over 120 years, carefully stored and currently housed at the Alegent Health Immanuel Medical Center campus. With the assistance of the Nebraska Library Commission, this sampling of items from the Immanuel collection has been made available through the efforts of the Fall 2008 and Fall 2010 Advanced Cataloging class at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, under the guidance and direction of the instructor, Corinne Jacox, and Karen Hein of the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Antelope County Historical Society

The Antelope County Historical Society in Neligh, in partnership with the Raymond A. Whitwer Memorial Library in Tilden, received a grant in 2006 for the digitization of a collection of large (4x6 to 8x10) glass plate negatives. These are images of various people, buildings and scenes in and around Neligh and Antelope County. The Society’s photograph collection is continually expanding and the intent is to eventually have 200 or so pictures of historical significance digitized and available through Nebraska Memories.

Beatrice State Developmental Center

The Beatrice State Developmental Center has served mentally retarded citizens continuously since 1887. BSDC provides habilitation and training for individuals to reach their maximum potential. The facility provides backup and resource services to Nebraska communities, with an emphasis on the integration of BSDC with services in the communities.

Bess Streeter Aldrich House & Museum

The images in this collection will give the viewer a deeper understanding of the influences and inspirations that Bess Streeter Aldrich drew upon when writing the 1928 novel “A Lantern in Her Hand.” The items shown in the images are on display at the Bess Streeter Aldrich House and Bess Streeter Aldrich Museum in Elmwood, Nebraska.
 

Boston Studio Collection: The entire collection consists of over 68,000 negatives that record life in and around David City, Nebraska from 1893 to 1979. Harvey Boston, a professional photographer in David City, from 1893 until his death in 1927, opened  a portrait studio business which was later run first by his daughter Edith Boston Proskovec and then by his son-in-law Audrey Hurlbert before being sold to John and Fred McVay in 1973. Negatives and ledgers describing each photograph are stored at the Hruska Memorial Public Library in David City. Just over 1,000 images from this collection are now available through the Nebraska Memories database.

Hruska Memorial Public Library: The library located in David City, Nebraska was awarded a LSTA grant in 2004 to work in partnership and digitize contents of the Boston Studio Collection. Volunteers have digitized and described over 1,000 glass negative slides for the Nebraska Memories project.
 

Cheyenne County Historical Society and Museum

Cheyenne County Historical Society and Museum, located in Sidney, worked with the Nebraska Library Commission to digitize items from their collection of historical photographs representing people and places of Sidney, Fort Sidney, Potter, Dalton and other communities and sites in the county.

Crawford Historical Society and Museum

The Crawford Historical Society and Museum, in partnership with the Crawford Public Library, received a grant in 2005 for the digitization of a number of photographs and postcards. The images show Crawford residents, businesses, and the surrounding area in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
 

Fairmont Public Library/Fillmore County Historical Society

The Fairmont Public Library in partnership with the Fillmore County Historical Society located in Fairmont, Nebraska, is working with the Nebraska Library Commission to digitize, and make accessible on the web, photographs depicting the history of Fillmore County from their collections.
 

Hastings Public Library

Hastings Public Library: The library received a grant in 2005 to digitize text of books covering local Hastings' history and Nebraska-related history that are not widely held by other libraries.
 

High Plains Historical Society

High Plains Historical Society and Museum: Photographic images included in the Nebraska Memories database from the High Plains Historical Society document early growth of the CB&Q Railroad in McCook, Nebraska, and surrounding area from the early 1880s through the 1960s.

McCook Public Library: The library was awarded a LSTA grant in 2005 to work in partnership with the High Plains Historical Society in digitizing photographs documenting railroad history in western Nebraska.
 

Jane Pope Geske Heritage Room of Nebraska Authors

In 2006, the Heritage Room at Lincoln City Libraries received IMLS grant support through the Nebraska Library Commission to digitize select materials from the Rudolph Umland Papers and the Nebraska Federal Writers' Project for the NLC's "Nebraska Memories."

Umland served as an editor and from 1936-1941, as Assistant State Director of the WPA's Nebraska Federal Writers' Project. A life-long friend of writers Mari Sandoz and Loren Eiseley, Umland donated personal correspondence and a fifteen-volume scrapbook to the Heritage Room in 1989.

The digital collection will be a resource for students and teachers interested in Nebraska writers as well as those interested in the broader social history of the Great Depression. The collection, and a related web exhibit on the Heritage Room home page, document the striking influence of Nebraska writers in shaping the innovative vision of American history and culture that guided the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project.

Keene Memorial Library

Keene Memorial Library: Keene Memorial Library located in Fremont, Nebraska was awarded a LSTA grant in 2004 to work in partnership and digitize content owned by the Dodge County Historical Society also located in Fremont. Keene staff, working alongside Dodge County Historical Society staff, have digitized and described a collection of photographs documenting businesses in the late 1800s and early 1900s in Fremont, Nebraska.

Dodge County Historical Society and May Museum: The institutions have contributed over fifty images of businesses and architecture in early Fremont to the Nebraska Memories collection.
 

Lincoln Public Schools

Historical materials related to the Lincoln Public Schools have been collected and saved in some form and in various offices, library sites, and schools since the inception of the first school in the county. Over the past 15 years, the Library Media Services Department has made a deliberate attempt to collect, preserve, and archive the history of LPS and make various items available to the staff and also the public. This collection of school building photographs is the beginning of what we hope to be a growing and evolving freely accessible digital collection.
 

Mitchell Public Library

Local historian Jane Hills Bowman collected pictures and stories about Mitchell’s early years. This collection includes her pictures of some of the earliest scenes from Mitchell's business district as well as the first public school buildings.
 

Nebraska Children's Home Society

The Nebraska Children’s Home Society was chartered September 1,1893. Nebraska Children’s Home Society founders challenged the practice of placing abandoned, abused and neglected children in orphanages and “poor houses”. NCHS Founders had a vision for a better future and believed that every child deserved a family. NCHS offered support and assistance to parents committed to keeping their family together, and provided foster and adoptive homes for children who could not stay with their families. The agency has never charged fees for adoptions services, and still today relies primarily on private donations to fund its services. In the ensuing years, NCHS has committed itself to best practices based on the welfare of a child. The commitment to “safe and loving care” in a family setting remains a hallmark of NCHS services.
 

Nebraska Library Commission

The Nebraska Library Commission's collections include material on the history of libraries in the state of Nebraska. Digitized images currently in Nebraska Memories include mostly exterior photographs with a few interior shots of libraries built prior to 1930; the majority of these libraries were built with Carnegie grants.
 

Nebraska State Historical Society 

Content from the John Nelson collection is currently available for access through the Nebraska Memories database. John Nelson was born in Harestad, Sweden, in 1864. He came to Nebraska with his parents at the age of seventeen. His photographs tell the story of small town life in Nebraska during the first decades of the twentieth century. His subjects included local businesses, community activities, and early automobiles.
 

Nebraska Wesleyan University, Cochrane-Woods Library

The archives housed in the Cochrane-Woods Library of Nebraska Wesleyan University holds several thousand photographs on various media. In 2008, the archives launched an effort to digitize, catalog, and describe photographs of NWU's campus buildings. The collection consists of mainly exterior shots of individual buildings, along with several views of the campus layout as it evolved from 1891 through the 1970s.  

Omaha Community Playhouse

The Omaha Community Playhouse collection includes digitized images of the Playhouse and some of its performances. Some of the actors included in these images are Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda, and Dorothy McGuire. The Playhouse partnered with a University of Nebraska at Omaha Advanced Cataloging class, with the help of John Seyfarth, to create the images and metadata records for some of their extensive collection of photographs to contribute to Nebraska Memories.
 

Omaha Public Library

The library was awarded a LSTA grant in 2005 to digitize and describe early Omaha-related maps dating from 1825 to 1922. Additional items in the grant project include over 600 postcards and photographs of the Omaha area.
 

Phelps County Historical Society

The Holdrege Area Public Library received a grant in 2008 to partner with the Phelps County Historical Society to digitize a collection of images portraying the history of Phelps County since the mid 1880’s. Subsets of this collection depict the Atlanta POW Camp which housed German prisoners of war during WWII, photos of Dr. Frank A. Brewster, known as the “Flying Doctor,” and the Christian Children’s Home. There are also several photographs from the George W. Johnson collection at the Museum that show typical scenes from the Buffalo Bill Wild West show in which Johnson was a performer.

Polley Music Library

The library has received three LSTA grants to digitize a variety of music related items. Just over one hundred pieces of Nebraska sheet music are available through the Nebraska Memories databases, as well as concert programs, manuscripts, theatre programs, photographs, and other Nebraska memorabilia which features an element of music. Searchers can also listen to a dozen performances of selections from this music collection performed by local musicians.
 

Raymond A. Whitwer Tilden Public Library

The library received an LSTA Grant in 2006 for the purpose of digitizing the text of a collection of local history that was compiled by the Tilden Women's Club in the 1950's. The original purpose of the collection was to make a printing to distribute locally. No printed copy of this collection has been found.

Sarpy County Historical Museum

Located in Bellevue, Nebraska, Sarpy County Historical Museum's mission includes collecting, preserving, and displaying objects and documentary records related to Sarpy County. The Museum partnered with a University of Nebraska at Omaha Library Administration class and the Sump Memorial Library to create digital images and metadata records for a variety of their photographs and artifacts to contribute to Nebraska Memories.
 

The Durham Museum

The William Wentworth Collection at The Durham Museum consists of 4663 negatives of images that document life in Omaha, Nebraska from 1934 through 1950. William Wentworth worked as both a freelancer and a commercial photographer, providing a unique view of architecture, businesses, and community life in Omaha. This portion of the William Wentworth Collection, the first of any collection to be digitized at The Durham Museum, has been made available to the public from the efforts of: Karen Frizzell, Associate Curator and Project Director; Bill Gonzalez, Photo Archives Associate; and Bob Etzel, Tom Byers, and Bill Steckelberg, Photo Archives Volunteers.

The Lincoln Police Department

The Lincoln Police Department's collection includes digitized images of police officers from 1885-1907 and department annual reports from 1942-1973. The annual reports include some photos of departmental personnel, statistical information about accidents, arrests, traffic citations and some list all employees.

Townsend Studio

Townsend Studio has been in continuous operation since it was founded in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1888 by Timothy Townsend with his sons, Alva C. and Charles. Alva continued the operation until 1945 when he sold the studio to Ben Meyer. In 1970, James N. Clark purchased the studio. Today it is run by his son, Bradford J. Clark. The studio holds a collection of glass plate and acetate negatives of early Lincoln and early residents including General John J. Pershing, William Jennings Bryan and Mari Sandoz; images also include University of Nebraska and high school sports teams, state governors and Lincoln mayors.

Union College, Ella Johnson Crandall Memorial Library

The library at Union College is home to an archival collection of books, periodicals, audiovisual materials, photographs, artifacts, and manuscript collections related to the history of Union College and the College View community. The photographs selected for inclusion in Nebraska Memories include early scenes of the Union College campus and downtown College View.

University of Nebraska at Kearney

As part of its effort to maximize access to its collection of photographs of the early history of the institution, the Calvin T. Ryan Library at the University of Nebraska at Kearney is working with the Nebraska Library Commission to digitize and make available on the Web selected photos from its collections.

Valley Public Library

The Friends of the Valley Public Library, Valley, NE, have digitized and described a collection of photographs depicting businesses and members of the local population between the late 1800s and 1900s in Valley.

Wayne State College

In a continuing effort to preserve and make accessible photographs depicting the history of Wayne State College and the region it serves, the Wayne State College Library is digitizing selected photographs from its archives.