The goal of the Maine History Preservation Initiative is this simple, and ambitious.

With the help of generous grants from the Davis Family Foundation and the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, MHPI has aquired the same state-of-the-art digitization equipment used by world class museums and archives such as the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution.

MHPI will loan this equipment to organizations in Maine that hold significant collections of documents, images, and artifacts related to the history of Maine. With guidance and training provided by MHPI, these organizations can digitize their collections, creating ultra-high resolution digital images.

In addition to storing these images for their own records, these organizations can submit them to the Maine Memory Network free of charge. On this Web-based network, these images will be available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection, bringing Maine history to a global audience.

Pulling this important historical data out of small, inaccessible, and often at-risk collections and making them available worldwide is what the MHPI is all about.