Website features historical Benicia in photos, documents, more

By Keri Luiz
Assistant Editor

The Benicia Historical Museum has launched a new service on its website for people to access an extensive archive of images and documents.

“This is being presented to the public, because frankly there has been a demand for access to this kind of information, and the museum is happy to provide it,” Executive Director Elizabeth d’Huart said. “It has wanted to for quite some time.”

She said the public can access whatever image the museum has in its system through a service called PastPerfect-Online, which provides a searchable archival service to museums, libraries, archives and other organizations around the world.

The museum’s database currently has 10,000 images that are a mix of photographs, artifacts and documents — even old clippings from The Benicia Herald.

It has taken the museum’s volunteers — Fred Paine, Bob Kvasnicka, Beverly Phelan and Roberta Garrett — quite a while to put it together, d’Huart said, and currently that’s the total capacity the museum can fund.

“Basically it’s going to allow people to do the kind of research that they enjoy, either students in our schools or authors doing research, people interested in getting photographs of houses … anybody who has a general interest in Benicia, its history, what was and what is will be able to go online and see if they can find it,” d’Huart said.

While low-resolution versions of archived images are available online, high-resolution copies can be ordered and delivered by email or on a CD, for a slightly higher price.

“We’re pretty excited about it,” d’Huart said. “We’re endeavoring to keep pace with what museums are doing now.”

She said it is only recently that museums, even large and well-funded ones, have begun to put their collections online.

“Those who have been born into and those who are now participating in the digital age expect to be able to find everything online,” she said.

On the museum’s home page, beniciahistoricalmuseum.org, there is now a button that will take searchers to the Public Retrieval Interface Portal (PRIP) that will allow them to look for images.

Besides the ability to search for archival images and artifacts, there is also an option for people to ask questions, provide feedback and contribute information to the museum by email.

“We have a lot of people who call up and say, ‘I came to your museum and I saw my great uncle in that photograph, and his name is Fred,’ they’ll have the ability to do that,” d’Huart said.

Because the email requests are handled by the museum’s part-time volunteers, d’Huart is asking for patience in receiving responses.

“It’s taken a lot to get us to this point,” she said. “I’m really, really pleased.”

“This is part of our mission to educate the public about the history of Benicia. It’s been a long time coming and we’re really happy to be able to provide it.”