The Office of the Secretary of State, which oversees the Washington State Library and the Washington State Archives, announced in late September that 33 local libraries and government agencies will share $600,000 in grants under state programs to improve local resources.

Among those was a $14,536 grant to the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, who plans locate previously undigitized items from their collections, digitize them and add them to The House of Seven Generations (H7G) Online Museum.

The items to be digitized will be identified during an inventory of the archives conducted in the summer of 2023. Materials that they expect to digitize include VHS and cassette tapes of tribal events and language classes and documents collected and created by the Tribe’s first cultural resources specialist who served as the repatriation coordinator for the three S’Klallam/Klallam Tribes in the 1990s and early 2000s, following the passage of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act.

According to state officials, the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe will use the newly digitized materials to create a digital exhibit to add to H7G on Tamanowas Rock, an ancient sacred site of the S’Klallam people.

The project will be shared through a station in the library’s physical exhibit space, the Tribal newsletter and a Zoom presentation.

The Library’s Washington Digital Heritage grant awards are in their 16th year of funding projects that promote the creation and sharing of content documenting state history.

This year’s record award of more than $150,000 will benefit 13 recipients, from small rural to large academic libraries, for projects including digitizing records, photographs, and recordings; recording oral history interviews; organizing digital collections; and creating digital exhibits.

The Washington Digital Heritage Grants are funded by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.

“It is an honor to oversee programs that help so many worthy recipients do the vital work of preserving and documenting our shared history,” Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said.

“Local libraries and government agencies often have extremely limited resources. These longstanding programs are an excellent way for the state to help get important jobs done.”