We welcome Burgess Thomas

We're pleased to welcome a new staffer here at the Preservation League. Burgess C. Thomas, who sometimes goes by "Bird," is our new event coordinator and rental coordinator. Burgess has a background in the area of professional interior design, as well as environmental education and event planning. She'll be working with groups who rent the Elks Ballroom and Swenson House for events throughout the year, and also with our Board on planning our own fun events. With the Swenson House Centennial coming up, Burgess will be very involved in the planning for ways to celebrate that milestone. We're also getting ready to kick off the stabilization of the J.D. Magee home at 1910 North 3rd, and her project experience will be very helpful on that, too. Welcome!

--wdm

The Abilene Photo Collection is now Online!

I spoke with friend Alice Specht, Head Librarian of the Richardson Library at Hardin-Simmons University this morning and she had a bit of news: the Abilene Library Consortium and its partners have finished the digitization of over 10,000 photographs in the Abilene Photo Collection. This is a terrific research tool for documenting and researching historic buildings in Abilene. To check it out, you can use this URL: http://rupert.alc.org/library/darc.html.

The beginnings of this collection date back to the 1981 Abilene Centennial, when as part of the celebration residents were encouraged to bring in family and commercial photos to be copied for archiving. Dr. B.W. Aston shepherded the collection in its early years. The Abilene Library Consortium received a grant to digitize the collection, along with some historic maps and other documents. Previously, you could search the indexes, but to see any of the images you would need to make a trip to the research center, but now the images are available for all to learn from and enjoy.

--wdm