Waterside Heritage secured a grant from HAT for £389 to purchase a slide scanner to digitise and catalogue over 15,000 mounted slides. 35mm slides, especially colour ones, deteriorate with time and the slides are showing signs of deterioration. Digitising them will save the images and eventually allow them to be accessible via Waterside Heritage’s website https://www.watersideheritage.org.uk/ The scanner has been bought and set up, and the first volunteer trained to use it. Be patient, it will take time to get to the website but a start has been made
Waterside Heritage collects, preserves and research archive material of the Parishes of Fawley, Hythe & Dibden and Marchwood on the west bank of Southampton Water. They produce displays of their research through the medium of open days, hosted visits to their Heritage Centre for schools and local organisations and newsletters. In the past they have prepared displays for local schools but sadly this has now stopped because local history does not feature on the national curriculum. Their major project at the moment is to digitise their holdings with the aim of making them available and searchable on the internet. So far they have digitised about 40,000 photographs and about 50,000 documents.
