An effort to preserve local history and make resources more accessible received a $53,970 grant Wednesday from the Washington County Riverboat Foundation.

The grant was presented to the Washington County Library Association for a southeast Iowa digitization project. Director of the Washington Public Library Debbie Stanton explained the project, “It will represent the digitizing of newspapers in 13 different communities in southeast Iowa. So every single community in Washington County that’s ever had a newspaper a newspaper will be digitized, and then a lot of outlying cities as well including Keota, Richland, Crawfordsville, Wayland, and even Columbus Junction is also going to be part of the project. We are so excited to make this happen.” All of those papers will then be put online in digital form. Everything will be web-based and people will be able to do a keyword search to go through more than a century’s worth of articles. Stanton said this will help students, with local history research, and genealogical searches.