WESTBROOK – Inside the Walker Memorial Library are nearly century-old photographs of horse-drawn floats from a parade celebrating the town’s 100th anniversary, photographs of the old Star theater during a rubber drive and a smattering of images that show how the town looked in centuries past.

Now, those images are being digitized so that they can also be found online through an easily searchable database instead of having to comb through the library’s archives in person.

The digitization of some of the historic photographs at the library came about as a way to help preserve the city’s history and show it as it once stood, which, due to urban renewal in the 1960s and ’70s, was a lot different from today.

“We’ve chosen photos of a lot of old buildings,” said Julie Peterson, the library’s curator. “A lot has changed here. Urban renewal razed a lot of the older buildings. There were a lot of churches, a lot of schools. When we’re done we hope it’s a good cross-section of what the city looked like.”

Peterson and Jennifer Leo, the technology coordinator at the library, are heading up the digitization project, along with two other library workers who each volunteer an hour per week to the year-long endeavor.

The project started last December, when the library applied received a $1,000 grant through the Maine Historical Society.

Those funds have gone toward the purchase of a scanner, pay for the workers and an external hardrive. Eventually, Leo said, the money will also be used to purchase archival boxes, which help protect the photographs from damage and erosion due to the elements.

So far, only 35 pictures out of the 100 slated as a long-term goal have been uploaded onto Maine Memory Network, the website that will display the images, along with thousands of other documents uploaded to the site from historical societies around the state.

“There’s a lot of history in this city, we want to make sure people know about it and make it accessible for the community,” Leo said.

While it may seem like an easy process to simply scan in a photograph and upload it to a website, the whole process is much more in depth. Each photograph must be sized specifically and the network will only take completely straight images, which as anyone who has used a scanner knows, can be a difficult process.

Once the image is scanned, the research begins. Peterson spends hours finding as much information as she can about each photograph uploaded. Some images come with information, some buildings and people Peterson knows from growing up in Westbrook, but many photographs need their own histories filled in, with help from the library’s archives, the Internet and work with other historians.

For example, one of Peterson’s first uploaded photographs to Maine Memory Network was a picture of a man on a bike. Instead of just describing the picture as showing a man on a bike, she had to research who he was and why the image was significant.

“This photograph shows Henry F. Smith, at the age of 72, riding his bicycle to do his errands. Smith was a retired carpenter at the S.D.Warren Paper Co. in Westbrook and the recipient of the first bicycle license, license #1, issued by the City of Westbrook,” reads the description.

There are images of the fire department from 1914 showing a wagon being pulled by horses. There’s an image of the covered Cumberland Bridge, and a photograph of workers from the S.D. Warren box shop around 1934, complete with a list of names of all the people shown in the photograph.

Once the image is upload, the research done and description written, it’s up to the Maine Memory Network staff to approve the photograph and historical content. Sometimes that can take days, sometimes only hours, but so far only the first image was rejected because it needed more background information.

“The historical society is pretty strict in the way we have to have it scanned in. If there are rips and tears, they want to see all of it; we’re not just popping them in and scanning. They have requirements so you can zoom in and see everything,” said Peterson.

Right now the women say the goal is not to archive the whole of the library’s historical collection. Instead, it’s to make a smattering of historical photographs available in time for the city’s bicentennial celebration next year, which will also mark the 120th year the library has been open.