WESTFIELD – Peter J. Miller Jr., recently appointed Community Development Director, will be adding more new duties to his plate as his department provides staff support for boards and commissions.
Monday night Miller discussed that support with the Historical Commission that is undertaking the mammoth task of developing a concept, and cost estimate, for the city’s historical document preservation effort.
“I will be overseeing the preservation of historical records,” Miller said of the multi-departmental program to safeguard decades of municipal documents. “How can I help the Historical Commission? Community Development will help with staffing issues for the commission.”
The Historical Commission has slated a discussion with a historical records preservationist at its April 22 meeting.
“We hope that discussion will help us figure out how much it will cost for a study and how much for the actual preservation project,” Miller said.
Miller said the first step is to develop a comprehensive plan by determining which documents have to be preserved and where records would be stored, as well as identifying which records will be electronically copied and where the digital data will be kept.
“It would be good to get a feel for how much it will cost,” Miller said.
Commission Chairwoman Kitt Milligan asked Miller to invite City Clerk Karen Fanion to attend the April meeting with the preservationist, Chris Shartrand.
“Her department will play a huge role in this project,” Milligan said.
Miller said that Fanion “has to facilitate this whole thing. Her staff has to be comfortable with operating the indexing equipment. There has to be a real buy-in from her department.”
Miller said a primary goal of the project is to move the documents into a facility with a controlled environment to not only preserve the records, but also protect City Hall, which is undergoing extensive renovations.
“The load on the building from all of those records, stored on the upper floors, is one of the reasons it is crumbling,” Miller said. “Relocating them will also free up space for other uses, such as offices. We have to find a permanent, secure location for the physical records. The papers that should not be in this building.”
Milligan said that many records and artifacts collected by the Historical Commission have been loaned to other facilities.
“A loot of things that have to be preserved in a safe location have been loaned to the (Westfield) Athenaeum,” Milligan said. “That also gives people greater access to those materials.”
“If and when we do get the museum up and operating, that will also be a location for some of these artifacts.”Milligan said.
Milligan said that part of the preservation process would entail locating storage of documents and bringing them to a central location where the records can be identified and organized. Some of those documents will then be electronically copied.
“I have been told that there are records in different places, records of historic nature,” Milligan said. “When the digitizing operation begins, we’ll have to bring those records here so they can be preserved. It’s frustrating that no one has ever pulled everything together.”
