Braswell Memorial Library is trying to keep Rocky Mount from losing its history.

The library’s project to digitize the collection of local photographer Charlie Killebrew has come a long way since it was launched in February. More than 9,000 negatives have been scanned and are awaiting description. Last month, the library made Liz Gregg the part-time digital services manager overseeing the project and bought a new scanner and software to speed up the process.

Despite limitations of a lack of manpower, money and information, Gregg hopes by late January to have more of Killebrew’s pictures posted on the library’s Web site, braswell-library.org, with the new software for the public to see.

But with a collection totaling about 500,000 negatives to sort through, scan and describe, the job ahead still is a monumental task that is going too slow, she said.

“At the pace we are going, we are saying it is 40 or 50 years before this project would be complete. Keeping in mind that includes scanning these objects, 50 years from now, they are going to be 50 years older than they already are now, and some of them are 40 years old now. So you are looking at scanning 90-year-old objects,” Gregg said.

From 1948 to 1997, Killebrew captured the history of the city and surrounding area, Gregg said. He photographed accidents, fires, ribbon cuttings, weddings, festivals and everyday life. He sold his collection of negatives to the library in 2003, but digitizing them was put on hold until this year.

Because the project is so massive, Gregg and Traci Thompson, Braswell’s local history and genealogy librarian, want to apply for a $20,000 planning grant from the State Library of North Carolina to hire a consultant to help them organize and prioritize the project, Thompson said.

For now, the project is in the hands of four people: Gregg; photographer David Weaver, who scans the images; Thompson, who helps identify people and places in them; and Phillip Whitford, who puts them online and in a slideshow on a plasma screen television in the library. They all work on the project part time, even Gregg, who only is allotted eight hours a week for it since she also manages the homework center for teens and the young adult book collection.

Until recently, most of the forward momentum of the project was with Weaver as he sorted through, selected and scanned thousands of images. At first, he focused on older negatives from the 1940s and ’50s, trying to preserve them before they deteriorated. Even that was delayed because many of the negatives were larger formats and could not be scanned with the existing equipment.

A $36,000 grant from Rocky Mount Community Foundation allowed the library to purchase a new scanner and content management system that not only scans those larger negatives, but does it more quickly and produces a higher quality digital image, Weaver said.

“A standard 4-by-5 might take three minutes to scan before. This one will do it in two minutes. Over 400,000 negatives, that is quite a bit of savings,” Weaver said.

There are 4,360 images already on the library’s Web site. The bottleneck now to making more available to the public is identifying the people, places and events in them, Thompson said. On most of the negative sleeves, Killebrew wrote only a date and a few words, and it is clear they don’t always match the negatives inside.

So far Gregg only has been able to fully describe about 60 images.

Some of the people and places Thompson is able to identify through research, but it can be a laborious process. One of the most important resources the library has is the people who have lived in the area for years and might recognize people or places in the photographs. There still are people alive today who can identify images in the collection from 40, 50 and 60 years ago, but they won’t be here forever and neither will the negatives, Thompson said.

“The people who could tell us who are in these images could die. The memories are going to die with people if we don’t get it out there quickly enough for them to help us identify. The negatives are going to deteriorate,” Thompson said.

The public already has been showing how important they are to the process, said Whitford, associate director for support services. After he began putting scanned images in slideshows on one of the library’s televisions, people stopped to watch them and would tell staff when they saw themselves as a teenager in a homecoming parade or their parents on a farm.

“It is not about the technology, and it is not about the fact that there is this huge collection. It is the history of the local area. It is a wonderful tie-in to people, places and events that are in our recent past. It is not ancient history to us,” Whitford said.

The library also holds events called the “Killebrew Coffee Hour,” where the public is invited to look at digital slideshows and through binders filled with images that have been printed out, Gregg said. People can browse through and literally write on the image what they know about it. The next coffee hour events are at 2 p.m. Tuesday and 10 a.m. Jan. 16 in the Warner Meeting Room.

With some of the oldest images scanned, Weaver began sampling negatives from different decades, so the slideshows and binders represent a broad range of Rocky Mount’s rich history, Gregg said.

“I think it is so important to know where we have come from to be where we are today in this area. Charlie does that with his pictures. His photos walk you through everything, whether it is the railroad industry or debs or little league teams,” Gregg said.