Lithgow City Council Library Service is thrilled to be a recipient of a Community Heritage Grant for its Local Studies Section.
The funding will be used to undertake a preservation needs assessment of the Local Studies collection to ensure that nationally significant material will be available for future generations.
A Significance Assessment conducted by Roslyn Russell in 2016 found that: “The nationally significant story of Lithgow as the ‘cradle of Australian industry’ is well represented in the Lithgow Local Studies Collection, with records of coal mines, the railway, iron and steel works, meat works, pottery and brickmaking, a woollen mill, and the Small Arms Factory. The collection also holds records of workers’ organisations such as the Eight and Six Hours Day and Labour Day Committees and the Amalgamated Engineering Union. Australia’s involvement in war is also featured in the collection, which includes significant records relating to Indigenous serviceman Douglas Grant, and an officer’s training notebook compiled by Lieutenant Frederick Brown MC in 1917.”
This highlights how preserving the Lithgow Local Studies Collection is so important for telling the story of Lithgow’s industrial, labour, and social history.
The Community Heritage Grants (CHG) program provides funding to assist with the preservation of locally owned, but nationally significant collections. The grants also aim to make these collections more publicly accessible.
CHG is funded by the Australian Government through the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts (Office for the Arts); National Library of Australia; the National Archives of Australia; the National Film and Sound Archive and the National Museum of Australia. Find out more about CHG and how you can apply: https://www.nla.gov.au/content/community-heritage-grants-4
The Local Studies area of the Lithgow Library is open from 10:00am to 12:00pm Monday to Friday or other times by appointment. Displays of items from the collection are constantly changing and more information can be located on the library website at https://library.lithgow.com/.
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