Long Past? No, Our Past!

The State Library of Ohio is mandated by the Ohio Revised Code to preserve and provide access to Ohio state government documents. These often include reports and other materials, but what you may not know is that we also preserve entire web sites! So, if you’d like to find out about the work that Hope Taft did while she was the First Lady of Ohio, you can. And if you’re interested in the last day of the governorship of Ted Strickland, including a link to his farewell address, you can see that, too.

It isn’t always possible to preserve a site exactly as it looks while live, but we make every effort to capture information and links and make them accessible to our users. So, when you look at the Ted Strickland page above, you’ll see that the home page is no longer laid out neatly – sometimes that just happens – but you’ll still be able to click on available links and take a step back in time.

We aren’t just providing access to the websites of Governors and First Ladies, by the way. You can look at past version of state agencies’ sites, as well, including that of the State Library of Ohio, the Attorney General (Jim Petro and Richard Cordray), and Secretary of State (J. Kenneth Blackwell and Jennifer Brunner), the Ohio Women’s Commission, the Governor’s Residence and Heritage Gardens, and others.

When we think of Ohio history, we like to think of all of Ohio’s history, both long-past and recent. Whether it occurred five hundred years ago or just last week, we enjoy providing you with information regarding our state’s past. Archived web sites are just a small part of that: snapshots of times that have passed but are still important elements of who we are.

Thank you for visiting Ohio Memory in 2013, and please come back to see what we have in store in the coming year! ___________________________________________________________________________________ Thank you to Shannon Kupfer, Digital/Tangible Media Cataloger at the State Library of Ohio, for this week’s post!