The Masonic Digital Archives
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Join the Masonic Digital Archive Project
The driving force behind the Masonic Digital Archives Project is to make the facts and figures, reports and activities found in the proceedings of Masonic grand lodges and affiliated bodies and organizations available in a searchable database. Members, researchers, and educators will be able to search every page and word of our history back to 1733.
The George Washington Masonic Memorial is digitizing the proceedings of participating grand lodges to make them available online. Other media types, such as photographs, maps, and ephemera, may be included as well to turn your unique historical collections into fully searchable online resources available from any Web browser.
If you would like to join the Archive project, please contact George Seghers, Executive Director at George Washington Masonic Memorial.
Components of the Archives Project
We digitize proceedings and other archival material at high resolution. The scanned files will be delivered to agreed upon specifications for resolution, processing, organization, file naming and file format.
Finally, we enter the scanned images and text, using OCR technology, into an OCLC CONTENTdm collection to provide electronic access with full-text searching. The owner of the content, e.g., the publishing grand lodge, may determine who may access the materials from this database, from unlimited public availability, to private, password-protected access.
Once items are digitized and loaded into CONTENTdm collections. The archives, including text documents, photographs and maps to audio and video files are available on your browser.
Some highlights of CONTENTdm are:
Powerful User Interface
The Masonic Digital Archives permit users to perform text searches on entire collections, including books, newspapers, maps, audio/video and more. Flexible for collection building. CONTENTdm gives Grand Lodges full control over digital resources, their descriptions, access and display. It stores any type of file and displays all items viewable in a Web browser.
Active User Community
Through CONTENTdm, Freemasonry will become part of an active user community that is advancing efforts to digitize primary resources by sharing best practices and putting millions of items on the Web. Libraries' and other cultural organizations' successful digital projects have received community recognition, provided leadership, support genealogy research, and access to historical information.
View the Collections
- Grand Lodge of Kentucky
- Grand Lodge of Nebraska
- Grand Lodge of New York
- Grand Lodge of Ohio
- Grand Lodge of Oklahoma
- Grand Lodge of Washington
- Grand Lodge of West Virginia
- Masonic Services Association of North America - Winning Submissions for the Mark Twain Award for Masonic Awareness
Learn more
Please attend an upcoming Web session which will be conducted by OCLC staff. Contact Mark Tabbert at the Memorial to schedule a presentation on the Masonic Digital Archive project - Mark Tabbert.
Receive a price estimate for digitizing your Proceedings by contacting George Seghers, Executive Director at the George Washington Masonic Memorial. He will send a letter that outlines the pricing for your collection
