For several summers beginning in the 1990s the Friends of Peary's Eagle Island held an annual "archive day" at the island home of Polar Explorer Robert E. Peary, now a State Historic Site. Stored in a closet off of a porch in the home were boxes containing many of the personal papers of Admiral Peary and his family. On these archive days, these volunteers would work to catalog these papers and place them in proper archival storage containers.

In 2007, the year-long centennial celebration of Peary's expedition to the North Pole raised the importance of preserving these papers in a way that was much safer and more accessible to researchers than the musty old broom closet of a home that had no electricty, climate control, or fire prevention.

For the Peary collection, digitizing (or scanning) the collection was the best approach to undertake, and the first step was to find the equipment that would provide the highest-quality results possible while still being easy enough for many volunteers to operate. Acquiring this equipment required an investment of nearly $50,000 and, since the work could be completed in a few months, it would be possible to move the equipment on to other similar collections in need of preservation.

This idea grew into an effort now known as the Maine History Preservation Initiative which prepared grant applications in order to find the funding to purchase the equipment. With the help of generous grants from the Davis Family Foundation and the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, MHPI has aquired state-of-the-art digitization equipment used by world class museums and archives such as the National Archives, Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution.

The Harpswell Historical Society generously agreed to host the Peary collection and the digitizing equipment, while providing a place for volunteers to work on the project within a few miles of Eagle Island and many members of the Friends organization.

This partnership works especially well, since the Harpswell group has a substantial collection of its own that their members can digitize when work is not being done on the Peary collection.

This pattern of moving the equipment from repository to repository using volunteers to perform the work will continue until the equipment finally breaks down or we reach the goal of digitizing every piece of Maine history we can find.

As a key part of the initiative, the Maine Historical Society's "Maine Memory Network" is providing a platform on the Internet where each of the resulting images with descriptive data, can be permanently displayed at no cost to the organizations that own the collections.

As a result, organizations in Maine that own historical collections now have access to the equipment needed to digitize their collections and the vehicle to place them on the Internet--all at no cost. As each collection is completed, more and more of the wonderful story of Maine reaches the world.