Kristen Utley and Matthew Walker have enthusiastically begun their work putting thousands of new Sacramento Room images online. As our latest digitization interns from the graduate public history program at Sacramento State University, they received training on researching, scanning and uploading historical images at the outset of the fall semester. Since then, the two have added hundreds of images of postcards, ephemera, photographs and periodicals to the Sacramento Room Digital Collections, making even more of the Sacramento Room open to anyone with an internet connection.
Both Kristen and Matthew say research is the most interesting part of the job. One of the first pieces Kristen described was a 1908 colored postcard titled “J. McMorry Packing Department.” Her research led her to discover the unfortunate history of the seemingly cheerful grocery, which was robbed and set on fire.
Matthew
also loves “digging into the history” of Sacramento Room images, and recalls tracking down information on a 1971 program for a major community event he never knew existed — Father & Son Baseball Night — which in its 10th year hosted Sacramento area players, dozens of major league scouts and baseball greats like Hank Aaron and Dusty Baker.
The
Sacramento Room Digital Collection is an easy-to-use online portal to tens of thousands of images from the Sacramento Room collections — all of our photographs and postcards, 100 early yearbooks, countless pieces of ephemera and periodicals, and even a few city directories and phone books.