The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
The township library has launched a new, improved, online historic photo database that will one day hold thousands of pieces of history.
The new searchable database – located here – is comprised of photos that previously appeared in the library’s “Franklin Photo Archive,” as well as photos made by Elton H. L. Wade, the negatives for which were donated to the library in 2009 by his nephew, Robert Zimmerman.
The Franklin Photo Archive holds photos that were scanned around 1998, during the township’s bicentennial, Ann Smith, head of the library’s adult services department, said in an email.
“The photo database was, and continues to be, popular with those interested in Franklin Township history,” she wrote. “However, after a change in some hardware at the library we were no longer able to run the software that made the photo archive possible.”
The library began scanning the Wade photographs in 2013 and launched several exhibits of them on its web site, she said.
The hardware change that took the first batch of photographs offline was made in 2016, Smith said, after which she “began to explore finding an affordable way to provide online access to both the old Franklin Photo Archive and the Wade Collection in one searchable location.”
The result of that search, the archive launched last week, she said, “contains all of the Wade photographs we had previously posted online, and about 100 of the Franklin Township images that were previously available.”
“We plan to continue to add photos regularly, and as time permits, until all of the approximately 1,000 images from the Franklin Photo Archive are made available again,” Smith said. “We will add more images from the Wade Collection as well.”
