PITTSFIELD, Mass. – The Berkshire Athenaeum has about 60 old Pittsfield parks department scrapbooks detailing the city’s history which have been stored at the library for the past decade.

“They were falling apart,” said Ann-Marie Harris, senior technician in the local history department. “I mean, these have been re-done a little bit here, but they were falling apart, paper was crumbled, and no one was able to use them.” 

What You Need To Know

  • The Berkshire Athenaeum digitized dozens of old Pittsfield parks department scrapbooks
  • They’re available for anyone to view for free on the library’s website
  • The scrapbooks range from 1943 to 2007
  • They include everything from news stories about city budgets to write-ups of sports games

So the library’s local history department got a community preservation grant from the city to digitize them, and now, anyone can view and search them for free on the library’s website.

“Maybe your name is in there, so you can just do a ‘control-find’ and put your name in there, and you can see all the different pages and all the different years,” said Harris.

The scrapbooks range from 1943 to 2007, and cover everything from city budgets to sports games. Harris said she enjoyed looking at the events and festivals through the years.

“They would write up all the different winners of certain games that they had when they played them,” said Harris. “All of that history of Pittsfield and the fun parts of Pittsfield is a really, really unique thing that people don’t see very frequently.”

The scrapbooks have only been online for a few days, but Harris said they’re already getting a positive response.

“When people sit down at the computer and are looking up what they did in high school football and it’s listed there and their names are listed and they’re going ‘wow that was me, that was so cool,’ that’s satisfying to the librarians here,” said Harris. “They see that and they say ‘oh my god, this was worth the project, this was worth it.’”