Each year, the Utah State Historical Records Advisory Board (USHRAB) awards grants to organizations throughout the state to assist with the preservation and public access of our state’s history. These grants are made possible by funding from the National Historical Records and Publications Commission, opens in a new tab at the National Archives. As we get ready for the USHRAB’s 2024 funding season, we’re going to spend the next couple weeks getting to know our current grantees projects and the work the Board does to make Utah history more accessible.

The Park City Museum is a lively nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving, protecting and promoting Park City’s rich history and culturally significant sites.

What is one fun fact about your organization that the general public might not know?

We started as a single exhibit to celebrate the centennial of Park City in 1984!

What is your project? What kinds of documents are you working with?

Our project is digitizing thousands of negatives and prints taken by town photographer Kendall Webb from 1967 through 1975. This is part four of the digitization project.

Projects like this take a lot of time, labor, and care to complete. Can you tell us a little about the folks who will be working on this project? What are their roles, responsibilities, and motivations?

Dalton Gackle is in charge of all digitization projects. The main goal of his job is to provide access to Park City’s history through research, digitization, and social media. This project touches on all three aspects by researching the images to compile metadata, scanning them for digitization (and having them available online), and sharing them through social media.

Courtney Titus manages the Museum collections. The main goal of her job is to care for and catalog the collections items. One way to protect the images is to digitize them so the physical ones do not have to be brought out for access to them or their information.

Why did you/your organization choose these documents as your project? What makes these items special or significant?

These images cover a variety of topics in Park City and show life and changes in town between the 1940s and 1970s. No other collection shows us quite as much about Park City or its residents over such a long stretch of time.

What do you hope that the general public will do with these records once they are accessible?

We hope people will use the collections for genealogical research; do research about Park City and its changes over time; and share memories or stories about the people, places, events, and times shown in the images.

Is there anything else you would like people to know about your organization or project?

There is still more to do! The Kendall Webb Collection is one of the largest collections we have and there are still more images to digitize after this current batch. You can Explore the current photos here.