 Hi, I'm Alita Exline, Scholar and Communication Librarian at the University of New Hampshire. And I'm Sarah Stinson, Digital Collections Coordinator. Alita and I will be talking about our efforts to digitize the City and Town Annual Reports of New Hampshire. The digitization of New Hampshire City and Town Annual Reports has been an ongoing effort since 2008 with an initial sprint of scanning outsourced to the Internet Archive over a five-year period. This project was part of several library digitization projects proposed to save space and provide broader access. In paper format, this was a low-use collection. In a digital format, the ability to search for full text across the collection increased its potential for research. After 2013, we made a persistent but slow effort to complete the project as resources allowed. But at the rate of about 50 reports per year, it would take us 250 years to complete just the backlog, not accounting for the new reports issued each year. Meanwhile, we are periodically contacted by town clerks and researchers to address gaps in the collection. In the early part of the project, reports were given generic titles. The report shown here was titled Annual Reports for the Town of Bristol, New Hampshire, 1916, instead of its original long format title. We had always wanted to transcribe the titles accurately to increase discoverability. The COVID-19 pandemic created an opportunity. We quickly developed a workflow which allowed six staff members and two student workers to contribute remotely. This was tedious work that required attention to detail and quality control checks for accuracy. This project helped us maintain our workforce during a difficult period and we transcribed over 15,000 titles. In taking on this title transcription project, title accuracy wasn't our only consideration. We also wanted to address confusion users might experience around the differences of coverage date versus publication date. Using Durham, New Hampshire as an example, you can see the earliest reports ended March 1st, which was when New Hampshire has historically held its town meetings. In the late 1800s, the report date shifted to February 15th. The year ending date moved again to January 31st. We see yet another change in 1944 when the calendar year was adopted and report coverage stops at the end of December. Most towns have continued to use the calendar year for their report coverage, though some have introduced one more change and are now using the fiscal year ending June 30th. This variance in coverage date means that sometimes the publication date and the coverage date are for the same year, while other times the publication date is the following year. Having complete titles including report coverage dates makes it clear to users which report they are viewing. In 2019, our technology environment changed significantly when campus IT services were centralized. One impact of this change was the loss of several technology positions in the library. As a result, we abandoned plans to update the Fedora Commons repository that housed our digital collections and instead migrated to digital commons, which we were already using for institutional repository. In this location, the town and city annual reports got more traffic and we were able to better understand how the collection was being used. In spring 2021, the New Hampshire State Library invited us to apply for American Rescue Plan funds that they were tasked with distributing to libraries across the state. As the designated repository for printed town and city annual reports, the state library found the digital access we provided valuable and wanted to help us finish the project we'd started. Reports would be drawn from first the UNH collection and then the state library collection with more recent reports in born digital formats to be added from town and city websites. We applied for the funds and were approved with a short 12-month timeline to approximately double the size of the collection. The primary goal of the project was to digitize our collect digital copies of all known town and city annual reports. This included 20 towns that had no representation in the original project. We also uncovered two extinct towns and a few village districts in the process. Creating an accurate volume estimate for budgeting was difficult for multiple reasons. Our original estimate of 14,720 reports was slightly low because the New Hampshire State Library had a higher proportion of earlier volumes in their collection than we anticipated. There were some additional difficulties in generating a correct estimate at the beginning of this phase of the project. One was we could not say when a town first issued a report. Also, there were gaps due to years where there was no report issued, years where all copies of reports were lost, and some years where two reports were issued. Additionally, there were varying page lengths of reports. In this photo, you can see within a town's reports, the number of pages varies from a few to a few hundred. Because the Internet Archive cost model includes both per volume charge and a per page charge, differences in the number of volumes and number of pages change the total cost. Luckily, our initial estimates were in the ballpark of project costs, even though we ended up having more volumes with fewer pages than originally anticipated. A list of all previously digitized reports was generated and used to create a list of potentially missing volumes. This list was checked against the holdings of first the UNH Library and then the New Hampshire State Library. The matching volumes were retrieved, checked for condition, packed, and shipped via ground cable. We chose to work with the Internet Archive again to complete the second wave of scanning. A small team there manually scanned over one million pages on specialized equipment. They expertly handled fragile materials and carefully rewrapped the book trucks for safe return shipping. The resulting digital volumes were quality checked, described in metadata records, and uploaded to the repository. Physical volumes were shipped back to UNH, inventoried, and returned to their respective home collections. Numer reports, typically those produced in the past decade, were retrieved from city and town websites, described and uploaded. As recipients of ARPA funding all over scrambled to complete their projects, federal deadlines were extended at least twice for a couple of months each time. The extension required long lead times getting on the agenda of the New Hampshire Governor and Executive Council where COVID response topics dominated. Because of the short timeline, we needed to keep a very close eye on production numbers and expenditures from month to month to say on track and make adjustments along the way. We also had to keep in constant communication with the State Library and the Internet Archive about our progress and projections so they could allocate staff and other resources. Because of the complexities around this funding, we also needed to stay on top of the rules and requirements of all the involved parties, including the American Rescue Plan Act, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, New Hampshire State Library as a sub-granter, and our own UNH sponsored programs and administration. In this project, we digitized, described, and uploaded nearly 19,000 annual reports and added 1,700 born digital reports. With the funding provided, we successfully completed the goals of the project by making accessible all known annual reports from the University of New Hampshire Library and New Hampshire State Library Collections. This project more than doubled the size of the original collection. The New Hampshire City and Town Annual Reports Collection is used widely throughout the state and beyond and is a valuable source of historical data on the fiscal management and vital statistics of New Hampshire's municipalities. We've been delighted to hear from town clerks, public librarians, and historical societies who are using this material. This quote is representative of the feedback we've received. We've also heard from users that they have used these reports to research genealogy, land disputes, and expenditures. The potential for exploring both the fiscal and social history of our towns and cities is vast. Using Freedom New Hampshire's 1940 annual report as an example, we can learn on page 35 that the library spent about $20 in books that were ordered from Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. On page 45, the superintendent of schools links the unemployment of youth to world events stating, unemployed youth is the soil on which dictatorships grow to power. Later on this page, he outlines the need for a playground with flowers at the school. And on page 48 begins the list of births, marriages, and deaths for the year. Since the migration of the original collection, the annual reports have been downloaded more than a half million times. From our statistics dashboard, we can see that the UNH community, the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services, other state agencies, and local governments are the most frequent users. You can access the collection from the UNH Scholars Repository, UNH's institutional repository hosted on the Digital Commons platform. To access the collection, select departments, institutes, and programs from the homepage, and then expand digital collections. And here you see the New Hampshire City and Town annual reports. From the collection homepage, you can search across the collections by keyword or use advanced search to limit the date range or select other metadata fields to search across. From within a town's collection, you can search within that town's reports. For example, let's try searching chickens within Alton, New Hampshire's annual reports. And you can quickly see that three of Alton's reports mention the word chickens. From within a town's collections, you can also access a jump list to help you navigate across the years covered by this town's reports and navigate to the earliest reports if you'd like to. Alton's reports go back to 1884. If you click on an individual record for a report, you can see the complete metadata for that report. See how many times it's been downloaded in the last couple of years and see a preview of that report. You can also download the report in PDF format. We plan to maintain this collection going forward and are cooperating with the State Library and New Hampshire City and Town Clerks Association. Each year, Towns will deposit their digital annual reports in an online drop box we've established and will then add them to the collection. The New Hampshire State Library will continue to collect paper copies of each report per New Hampshire statute. This project wouldn't have been a success without the help of our project partners listed here. We were especially glad to have had such an excellent team of student workers. If you'd like to know more about this project, please reach out to us with any questions you may have. We would love to hear from you.