The Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation has funded the Palmer School of Library and Information Science at LIU, and they are in the midst of their six-year project to digitize materials provided by 28 participating historical societies. The project has gathered and digitalized 35,000 images, totaling about 8 terabytes of data.
The Symposium celebrated the digitization project and the work being done at LIU by showing three different presentations by the Fire Island National Seashore, Preservation Long Island and the Long Island Railroad Museum. Kimberly Cline, president of Long Island University, began by introducing the project. “I think this project is a truly important one that LIU is really focused on as a nationally recognized teaching and research institution,” said Cline. “And that means not only do we want to have great teachers in the classroom, but we also want to be giving back to our communities and doing good research. We felt like this is really important work. We need to make sure that we’re protecting the assets that we have and our historical knowledge. And I think the whole campus has really embraced this.”